Toward a Human Corporate Life
by Zoltán Dankó
Future-Proof Organization Practitioner -- Human leadership fuels high performance. If you have open mind, I help add open culture to leverage open-source - Change is risk: doing the same leads nowhere. Let's move on!
A huge number of books and articles had been published in the past decades on personality development. If we can believe in statistics, more and more people go to see professionals in psychology and psychiatry. Jumping to the conclusion: humans have become more conscious about themselves and they went through a big deal of personality development.
Does reality support this conclusion?
My reality and the people around me prompt me to draw another conclusion. The human condition has not changed much in daily life since Buddha had sought the truth. What changed, really changed, are the velocity of our life, the complexity of our daily dealings. These dramatic changes forced us to more extensive use of our masks. I mean by a mask the psychological construct of our thoughts, desires, values, pre-conceptions about our environment. Everyone has one without exception. In reality, everyone has many masks: one for wife, one for children, one for the colleague, and one for the neighbor. Our ego has been always busy managing the masks, the proper ones for different life situations.
Let’s have a thought experiment. If we had a chance to look into the mind of our colleagues at the time they come to work and when they leave for home, we could have probably strange and mind-blowing findings. This is a parallel reality. It is not about lying. It is the superhuman act of our ego to lead us through Scylla and Carbides of routine daily life. If we take a normal hiring process at a corporation, both parties put on their masks to play the game, to pretend to be somebody else.
At ERFI*, we have realized that no matter which fancy methodology you want to implement and use, Teal, Scrum, Agile, Waterfall, there is one common variable in all of them. The human being. The game that has been played in the past decades has been about to push the methodology concept into the mind of the colleagues. With a similar effect when we start to paint a rusty surface. In the PR campaigns, any of them is a huge success. In reality, they end up in despair and failure. It’s only a question of time. This insight led us to a different approach.
Our way of thinking went on as follows: our mind consists of different areas (in a simple model). We have a reptile (instinctive) brain with a sympathetic nervous system. It is responsible for keeping us alive. Fight or flight. When in action, it shuts down all the higher cognitive systems in us. We have also an emotional brain. Fortunately, everything that happens in us will go through this layer. That is why you cannot have any single memory or thought without emotional attributes. The third one is our rational, logical, cognitive mind. This is the realm of mathematics and sciences.
We started a personal development program for everyone at ERFI. Our goal is to convey the knowledge to the colleagues about how we all function. We do not suppose that it was taught at home or in school, because it wasn’t. We encourage colleagues to start to use self-reflection, acquiring feedback from their peers. We set off with the memory. The main insight was each memory would be constructed whenever and however the circumstances would generate them. Therefore, it was not similar to an SD-card: same input, same output.
The next one dealt with instinctive self, Ego, Superego, how we suffer, or enjoy their interplay.
We did not omit Fears and anxiety. We know them in our accelerated life, although we struggle to suppress or ignore them. If so, we end up in a negative spiral toward depression.
The message to the colleagues was the following: you should not learn all of these in order that you could work more. You should learn self-reflection and other techniques because you would achieve a more balanced existence at the workplace and in your private life as well. Search for the meaning of your life and strain after the Ikigai. To live a complete life.
Of course, I don’t have illusions that everyone will/want to learn about themselves. Some will be satisfied with a life rolling like the billiard balls. However, we focus on those who are willing to set out to reach a higher consciousness. They also will learn that our completeness means that we accept the composition of our mind and body, and we also find ways how to harmonize them to live a better and meaningful life.
Note: *= in English: Distributed Systems Development Directorate
