Finding Awe at?Work

In product, you’ll hear people tell you to “fall in love with the problem”. I’m not going to tell you that’s wrong. But I am going to tell you that first, you have to be awestruck.

I left my (awesome) job at the beginning of the year to figure out what to do next. Working in a fast-growing climate tech company was everything you’d imagine. Incredibly exciting. Incredibly busy. Incredibly intense. Incredibly rewarding. But in hindsight, I didn’t have a lot of space left for the experience of awe. This is in spite of the fact that I worked at a company with an inspiring mission, connected to the most urgent issue of our time, and deeply embedded in the energy system. There’s plenty of scope for awe in a role like mine. And that made me wonder, what do we lose if we’re not connecting to awe? And should we strive for more of it in our working lives?

To answer that, first we have to understand what awe is, and what it does for us. Maya Shankar ’s conversation with Dacher Keltner on A Slight Change of Plans is a wonderful primer. Keltner defines awe as “the feeling we get in the presence of something vast that challenges our understanding of the world” (emphasis mine). That describes almost any big problem in tech, whether it’s related to AI, the energy grid, insurance, healthcare, or any other complex human system. Keltner’s research shows there are many benefits to cultivating awe. A few of these benefits stand out as particularly important at work:

• Awe makes us more creative and curious
• Awe makes us feel small, which keeps things in perspective
• Awe sharpens our critical thinking

These are useful attributes in a startup environment. Unfortunately, many common practices and cultural norms in tech encourage ways of thinking that are the opposite of awe.

First, there’s the experience I had, of simply being too busy to pause and notice things that are awe-inspiring. This isn’t specific to tech?—?I imagine most people, in any kind of job, can relate to this experience. This is simple to address, although never easy. I want to dig into other aspects of tech culture that might not be so obvious.

You might remember that during the early months of the pandemic, some folks in tech had a lot to say about the inefficiency of healthcare systems. Founders opined on podcasts and local news about how they could do a better job rolling out testing, or vaccines. Some even tried, with?… mixed results. But in the end, healthcare experts did a better job of these rollouts, a few companies with solid processes and business models succeeded, and the hype around rapid healthcare disruption kind of fizzled out. What this episode highlighted was an attitude that the processes and expertise of tech can tame any system. That the problem is in the nature of the system itself, and throwing out complexity is the solution. That one individual with laser focus on the problem can bring the wondrously simple solution to life. In order to succeed in startup culture, there’s often subtle pressure to act as though you are bigger than the system, as though you can individually act in ways that are “transformative” or “disruptive”. There’s a lot of savior complex, and honestly, a lot of narcissism. And none of this leaves space for awe.

Design thinking has become an unfortunate poster child for this tech hubris. In the last couple of years, the practice has been criticized for trying to dive into complex systems with limited context, replacing expertise with empathy. At the center of design thinking is the idea of “beginners mind”, which should be a perfect mindset from which to experience awe. However, in practice design thinking often moves rapidly from developing empathy about problems to creating “innovative” solutions for those problems. Critics note that the work often centers the designer as a kind of “spiritual medium?… uniquely able to reinvent systems to better meet the desires of the people within them”. This approach once again encourages practitioners to feel big in relation to the system. The beginners’ mind skips over the complexity in order to intervene in a system it doesn’t really understand, instead of dwelling in that lack of understanding long enough to feel awe.

What does it look like when we humble ourselves a little? If we feel awe in the face of a complex system, instead of feeling like we can, or should, “solve” it?

I think, and care, about this a lot because I spend a lot of time trying to understand the energy transition, and in particular, the complexities of the grid. Our energy grid is a truly awe-inspiring system. I understand it more every day, and I think I will never fully understand. That’s fine by me. I gain a lot personally from the sense of awe I get whenever I think about the grid.

According to the science, I also gain professionally. As I prepare to move into my next phase of work, I’m committed to making space for awe. With that in mind, here are a few practices I’m exploring for cultivating a sense of awe at work:

1. Awe over certainty
2. Awe before empathy
3. Always be curious
4. Facilitation over solutions

Awe Over Certainty

Especially if you’re in any kind of leadership or influence role, make a point of expressing awe. In the Philadelphia vaccine rollout scandal linked above, the CEO said, “We took the entire model and just threw it out the window?… We said to hell with all of that. We’re going to completely build on a new model that is based on a factory.”

There’s so much certainty that a “rip and replace” of an entire complex system is a good idea. Instead, as a leader you have an opportunity to pause, and to put yourself in context. When articulating a vision or an idea, start by contextualizing it within a system, even if it’s only in your own head. Allow yourself to see the system as bigger than you, and to see your small place within it. Just reflecting on what’s big and mysterious about it should help cultivate some awe, and bring perspective. From that place, think about and communicate your vision for intervening in this system. Recognize that, while your work may one day be transformational, that’s an aspiration, not a reality. You’re already living in an awesome reality.

Awe Before?Empathy

Empathy is human-scale. That’s the power of it. But empathy can give us a false sense of true understanding. Awe puts our human scale in perspective. So try first looking at the big picture, at the whole huge, confusing system where your problem space resides. Look at it, and acknowledge that you don’t fully understand it. Then, try to empathize with the people who are immersed in that system. Not only does this help keep you humble about your expertise relative to the true experts you’re interviewing, it’s a tool for empathy in itself. You gain some insight into what those experts understand, and how big the gulf of understanding is between you and them.

Whenever I speak to long-time solar industry professionals, I find myself awestruck by the complexity of what they’re dealing with. Not just on the electrons side, although of course that’s super awesome, but also in the system of operations, financing, regulation, customer sentiment, incentives, and so on, that they are navigating every day. Glimpsing that vast complexity is humbling, but it helps contextualize the value of whatever piece I’m working on.

The Stanford d-school, which pioneered design thinking, is doing an admirable job of evolving its approach to be more equitable and just. They say: “The nature of design affords people the opportunity and privilege to shape the world that they–and others–inhabit. This is power. In a just world, that power is shared, prioritizing the voices and ideas of people most impacted by the intended and unintended effects of new designs.” The humility and perspective provided by awe make it much easier to prioritize those voices.

Always Be?Curious

This is a rule to live by! Curiosity keeps us open to the things we don’t understand. In our rush to solve big problems, it’s tempting to gloss over the complexity, or to pretend it doesn’t matter. We may eventually have to ignore some complexity in order to act on the part of the system that is our concern. This kind of laser focus is essential, but we need to balance it with curiosity. Curiosity is an antidote to the fear that complexity will overwhelm our ability to act. We must keep letting that curious part of our brain wonder at everything it doesn’t understand, while constraining the work we do to a more feasible set of problems. This means we have to take care of ourselves. If we’re burned out, too busy, too deep in the weeds, we stifle our ability to be curious. Snuffing out that spark of awe means we miss out on creativity and critical thinking. It makes us, in short, less good at our jobs.

Facilitation over Solutions

If we’re not the expert, we should think of ourselves as facilitators, rather than solvers. This is, frankly, a blow to the ego. But thinking about our non-expert selves as facilitators first and problem-solvers second, or even last, opens us up to getting more awe.

Facilitators tease out the information and insights from the experts around them. By positioning ourselves as facilitators, we are tacitly acknowledging that we’re not experts, that there’s plenty we don’t know, and we are tasking ourselves with the responsibility of unleashing all that unknown stuff.

We may never fully understand it, and we shouldn’t pretend that we do.

So as you’re hurtling toward the end of the year, I’d like to invite you to let a little awe in. Pause for a moment, and consider the scale of your industry, your product, your customer’s problem, whatever makes sense for you. Take that moment to feel how tiny you are, and how vast the system is you work in, and just?…