The foundations of a real ‘common ground’ - Connectedness, competence and autonomy

By John Turley, October 2020, with help from John Higgins

There’s an espoused assumption in much of the world that diversity is a ‘good thing’; that the organisation of the future will come about through a range of views and opinions coming together to deliver an ill-defined ‘common good’. This ‘common good’ comes from a magical collaboration that brings people together engaging in a joyous consensus, with meaningful work supporting personal wellbeing even as it?improves team and organisational performance. Conflict and difference are disappeared because they only exist if you can’t see the reality of the common ground which means we’re all in it together.?

This is the promise of an uncritical discourse about "adaptive leadership" and "the future of work", promoted at innumerable virtual conferences all over the world. ?This version of reality can only be sustained by retreating into the comfort of ever smaller echo chambers, which reinforce our existing views and make the world feel safe. By taking refuge in the espoused orthodoxy of common ground, we create a sense of security that protects us from the disequilibrium of engaging with an ever more unstable and unpredictable world, where real tensions and differences exist and conflict happens. We take less and less time to consider the views of others, different from our own, and double down advocating the world as it looks from our ideological stance.

This tension is further amplified by the growing gap between the advocacy of an idealised, consensual and collaborative working model and the persistence of a much more traditional, siloed, command and control one. This world of competing groups, of us and them, has become undiscussable because they are claimed to have been consigned to history. ?We talk about an idealised?future of the work as if it had transformed our worlds completely, while we continue to act out our past.?Finding a real, robust, common ground on which we can co-create a meaningful, shared vision of a better future gets lost.?

This is unsurprising if you pay attention to the persistent, standard discourse of the industrial 20th century. This is the discourse that still holds sway and values control, compliance, consistency, predictability and efficiency above all. This world view takes for granted that everything that needs to be known is known, or is at?least knowable, in ways we are familiar with. The tyranny of measurability is locking out our capacity to explore and learn. Learning and innovation are lauded, while we persist with habits of mind that ensure it can’t happen (except as an expression of rote knowledge). Learning through genuine experimentation, where people can admit to being wrong or simply not to know is a sign of weakness. What gets rewarded is being decisive, being addicted to action, speed and instant insight is all – keeping the world locked into cycles of superficial development. The world is known by breaking whole systems down into component parts and optimising those parts – and the qualities that connect components are assumed not to matter, as is the notion that the system as a whole has properties that stand apart from the parts. This is the world as a machine, known through the lenses of Newton and Adam Smith and it can very effective, while also extracting a high and often ignored price.?

As Smith observed in The Wealth of Nations, increasing the number of pin-makers ten times might have increased productivity a hundred times, but what about pin-makers? They no longer took pride nor found satisfaction in making a new pin, but that was in 1776. Frederick Taylor was still riffing on the same idea with Scientific Management at the turn of the 20th Century as was McGregor with Theory X and Theory Y that emerged in the 1950's. These ideas run deep in our culture, values we absorb without questioning as if by osmosis. These ideas are a view, dominant and, in some ways, effective, but not THE truth.?

In the 30 years that I have worked in IT, mostly in programmes and projects, one thing has remained constant. People are engaged, excited, fulfilled and at their happiest when they are doing meaningful work at the edge of their skillset, as?part of a group that is achieving something greater than they could achieve on their own. I began to notice this decades ago. Now I know that humankind knows this and knows why it is so. Yet on the whole we choose to ignore it.?

My go-to knowledge base?for this subject has Richard Ryan and Ed Deci's Self-Determination Theory that speaks to us having three universal basic psychological needs: connectedness, competence and autonomy. This is the common ground on which we all stand. If we support these three things in ourselves and in those around us wellbeing improves, which, incidentally, leads to deeper collaboration, higher levels of performance and satisfied stakeholders. Yet the organising principles around which we build the institutions that make up our society privilege a form of power and control that undermines our ability to decide for ourselves how to serve the collective (i.e. autonomy). Our uncritical valuing of competition and the ongoing existence (in practice) of fragmentary sub-groups which privilege their sub-part over the whole, separates us from each other. Meanwhile we have tried to address this deep-rooted fragmentation and institutional division with visions, missions and objectives so bland, meaningless and unclear that they achieve nothing beyond allowing us to tick the box that we’re all in together – when we’re obviously not.?

We can find common ground on which we can all stand to co-create a shared sense of meaning, but not if we continue to be wilfully blind to the knowledge accumulated over the millennia about what it takes to create a coherent community of energised individuals working together. It is through connection that we can deliver an experience of fulfilling autonomy and feel more competent because we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. This is what people such as Joyce Fletcher have been going on about for years.? We grow as individuals through our connection with others, not through our separation.

Yet this collective act of wilful blindness is difficult to shake off, perhaps because it preserves existing power structures.

The way most of us (66% in a study of 10,000 middle to senior managers in a study by David Rooke, co-founder of Harthill) make sense of our world we engage with comes from the industrial age – when it was fit for purpose.? Making sense of the intangibility and fluidity of the digital age demands a level of psychological complexity most of us don’t have, simply because the demands being placed upon us are so different.? The standard discourse doesn’t support, or even recognise as possible, the developmental potential of all adults. Thus we are held back, doomed to speak of the future of work as we act out the past, albeit with computers instead of steam-engines.

This gap between the complexity of our environment and our mindset creates deep problems for how we experience life at work.? Employee engagement is low (as shown in the annual Gallup World Poll) and workplace stress and anxiety has been increasing for decades (see Victor Lipman in Forbes 9.1.19) which might well have their roots in the human need for the environment to be stable enough in order to feel stable enough in ourselves. Stability has become seen solely as a bad thing, something that leads people to ‘resist change’ and get labelled as ‘blockers’, ‘late adopters’ and ‘luddites’, rather being understood as a foundation stone for our capacity to innovate.? Let me speak to how this has played out in my own life.

I spent the worst 18 months of my career, and some of the worst of my life, working for a large, high status institution.? Even as I hated every day, I remained determined to get through it, tough it out, marvelling at how I and my colleagues of the time? (I assumed my reality applied to us all) drew our self-esteem from our employment and the status our expertise commanded in the world.? I bought a fancy new car, expensive hand-made shoes and suits.? I hated the work and I loved the status it gave me.? I felt good and I know other people gave me recognition and respect for the same reason.

As I look back on this period of my life, I can now see that I drew much of my self-esteem, my identity, from my expertise.? Accepting that my expertise had flaws and gaps couldn’t enter my thinking, because to do so was to accept that I had flaws and gaps.? Better for me to push onwards, despite the pain, proving to myself that the status I had acquired and the money I earnt meant I was worth something and had “made it”.

It all fell to pieces for me, the constant need to be flawless proved too much. The work I put into shoring up my ego and sustaining a public display of unchallengeable technical brilliance, became too much. When reality came crashing in and I had to come to terms with my lack of perfection as a person and professional, so the opportunity arose for me to look at the way I made sense of myself and? my place in the world. It was obvious that things had to change.? I began to see that a sustainable sense of personal value couldn’t be based on my expertise and status, nor how productive I was, nor how much tax I contributed.? I didn’t have the answer but I knew that what I had lived by up until then was no longer fit for purpose.?

In the language of adult developmental psychology, I was learning to take a dispassionate view of the values and assumptions that were ruling me, that I was subject to. Now I could look at them at arm’s length, treat them as objects I could question and examine.? I was no longer making sense of the world by looking at it through long-held and once hidden assumptions. Instead I began to learn how to let go of my overly simplistic habits of mind – so the complexity of my sense-making became a little closer to the complexity of the environment around me.

You might, at this point, be thinking that this is all about me, that development is something undertaken by the individual in isolation.? You’d be mistaken. Firstly, the development of our individual sense-making is enmeshed with our context, inseparable from the environment we perceive around us.? Secondly, as we grow our capacity for sense-making, so we step into different ways of viewing everybody else in the world and our relationship to them. As we redefine how we understand what is meant by ‘I’, ‘We’ & ‘Us”, so we learn how to co-create a shared sense of meaning – escaping the limitations that come from simply seeking to impose my view on others.??

Or, to put it another way, we can see the common ground on which we all stand and, perhaps, help others find their way there too.