I was prompted to write this first blog while reflecting on our upcoming engagement unconference in London on 23 November, the first unconference I have ever been engaged in co-organising. Details at //http:www.dumbthings.co.uk.
I love words. Their meanings are constantly co-constructed and re-constructed between their writers and their readers and their meanings constantly evolve and change, according to their context and the communicators’ history and culture. The word context itself is from the Latin meaning, ‘woven together’.
I enjoy looking where words came from and what they originally meant. I think I gain useful insights into their current meanings and their deep, underlying, evocative resonances.
The word “happiness” comes from the very old English or Norse word ‘hap’, which meant ‘to come about’ or ‘happen’ (obviously itself also from ‘hap’). So “happiness” and “happening” are essentially the same word. Happiness is not about pleasure or money as such. Happiness is about being fully, authentically engaged with what is happening. As Eckhart Tolle might say, it is about being truly present.
Mihaly Csikszentmihali’s book “FLOW” beautifully captures how engagement becomes happiness. He defines flow as “optimal experience”, which I would say is as utterly engaged and happy as you can get. He notes, “the quality of life depends upon how we experience our work and the quality of our relations with other people”. He finds there are seven dynamic factors relating to flow.
My feeling is that four of those lead to flow and three result from it and then feed back into it, leading to its continuing. The seven factors are:
- Having realistic goals that you can complete
- Getting immediate feedback
- Opportunities for action are matched to capabilities
- Not being distracted so that you can focus.
So that:
5. Deep, but effortless involvement removes everyday worries
6 . Concern for self disappears, leading to a greater sense of self afterwards
7. The sense of time is altered so that hours can seem like minutes and moments can stretch joyously for ever.
Martin Waugh describes how boredom also distorts time, “Time seems endless, there is no distinction between past, present and future. There seems to be only an endless present.” The differences that makes the difference between flow and boredom, of course, are having purpose and the feeling of being in control, through complete harmony with whatever you are doing..
There are very good business reasons for engaging employees, customers and other stakeholders. A company that does so is much more likely to prosper, but that is not the point. To engage authentically comes from deep human needs. The success that engaging brings is a by-product of that humanity, not the quantifiable aim of a calculated strategy. It’s also fun. It makes you happy and it makes the people you engage with happy. Happiness, prosperity, engagement and wellbeing are all so intertwined as to be inseparable in a healthy company, in a healthy community.
A reason I joined Humap to set up Humap UK is our core belief, “better together”. We feel that work is better, that life is better when people do it together. ’Together’ is among the oldest English words, first written in AD705, and has changed its meaning little in 1300 years.
We think of togetherness as a good thing in social groups, between couples and even individually. When people feel they’ve “got it together”, whatever “it” is, they feel good and genuinely present. It is a quality we admire in others too.
Sadly, many people at work feel stressed and torn between conflicting roles and demands on their time. They have not “got it together”. Many feel lonely and alienated from their employer, cogs in a poorly functioning machine. Sadder still, are anxious people who are fearful of their future, fatigued by constant stress, staying longer to do their work, missing their families and friends, their lives. Then, when they are at home, instead of engaging with their loved ones, they are often not really there either. They are only ever partially present, distracted by their concerns. Their families notice that and are unsettled by it. Over time, their life and work performance both decline.
Humanity demands engagement as one of its most central, innate needs. People seek three kinds of engagement:
1. Engagement with other people. We need company. The worst punishments, bar death were exile, shunning, being made an outlaw, or excommunication. These were all things that cut a person off from society. A modern, corporate equivalent may be losing your job.
2. Engagement with whatever is happening, the flow experience as described above
3. Engagement with a higher purpose that provides some kind of life meaning.
A very important role of an employer and its leaders is to offer its people all three strands of engagement and to help them to weave them together. Some of the most effective ways of doing that include asking people what they think and how they are feeling. It also helps to demonstrate your own sense of purpose and awareness of what is happening around you and to tell people what is happening.
A very important role of a friend is to ask the same questions and demonstrate the same qualities. It is jokingly said that the definition of a bore is that when you ask them, “How are you?”, they tell you.
In one of the great British myths, King Arthur’s Tales of the Round Table, the knight Perceval inadvertently condemns a kingdom to years’ more desolation because he is too shy or pre-occupied to ask “What ails thee?”. Perceval is one of life’s great knights, destined to come closer to the Holy Grail than any man before him, but even he has to learn to break through civilisation’s conventions to ask a genuinely compassionate question. And when he does, the desolate kingdom is instantly transformed.
When asked with sincere interest and followed up with real listening, these are still questions that engage and thus transform lives and organisations.
“What ails thee?”, or as we might ask today, “How are you?”.