Whipped

The average slave driver on a sailboat understood well enough what was expected of him. In order to get the most productivity out of the slaves pulling oar on his ship, he had to use the whip judiciously, balancing just on the edge between fear and hope in order to force his charges to exert themselves and speed up the journey.

The average slave driver knew that he had to balance all this just enough, slaves that were burnt out would rather choose death than spend another day pulling oar under abysmal conditions and in constant fear of the whip. Slaves, on the other hand, that were treated too nicely had the excess energy necessary to think for themselves, coordinate with others around them and potentially plan a rebellion that would overturn the status quo and deliver the sailboat to them.

The average slave driver did all this through a carefully balanced mix of curses, threats, cajoling, promises and actual whipping. At no point throughout this journey did he make any effort to erase the difference between him, his men and the slaves that pulled oar, despite the fact that all of them were, quite literally, in the same boat.

You'd think that the reason this did not happen has to do with social structure and the norms that sequestered slaves from masters and made it OK for the former to own the latter. But that wasn't it. After all, in their shared journey slaves and masters shared the same dangers, ate largely the same food even if the quantities differed and drunk the same water. Should their sailboat fail in mid-ocean they all shared the same terrible fate. But what made it difficult, probably impossible, for any kind of leveling of status to truly take place was the fact that the expected rewards and the fate that went with those rewards was decidedly different for each lot. That, more than anything else, changed the perception of their shared journey to the point that it was actually a different journey each were on even when that journey happened to take place via a shared ship on a shared timeline.

Perception changed reality because it was based upon different expectations. This made the context of their shared underlying reality (i.e. the facts of sharing a flimsy ship on an open ocean) appear sufficiently different for their behavior to also be widely different.

Never would it occur to the average slave driver working his slaves just to this side of exhaustion, that they were equal in any way or that they were deserving of any different consideration other than what he was prepared to provide them with via the sharpness of his tongue and the tip of his whip.

Nor, would he even consider trusting them to pull oar sufficiently hard to shorten a perilous journey were he not there to apply the incentive of his whip.

Now let's apply this, as a schema, to work today and the WFH dilemma . Think about shared journey, common values, co-created goals and shared experiences. Think about trust. And status. And expectations.

?Do you see what I see??