Happiness for all

If you're angry, anxious or depressed, there's new hope. Richer, happier lives are now possible thanks to a new approach to mental and emotional well being called positive psychology.

And there are better days for the rest of us who live normal or contented lives. We too can now become happier and more successful. All thanks to Dr. Martin Seligman, who founded the field in 2000.

It's goodbye to the old disease model that dominated our thinking for much of the 20th Century. Back then we treated alcoholism and depression just like any other medical problem, as victims of pathologies rather than life choices. With drugs and psychological methods. The best we could hope for was to reset our misery clocks back to "zero" to live "empty", inert and unfulfilled lives.



Seligman discovered there are very few differences between happy and sad people. Happy people are not better looking, richer, fitter or more religious than miserable people. Just very social, with secure romantic relationships and a rich repertoire of friends.

And there are three kinds of happy lives, in ascending order of enjoyment:

* the pleasant life. We enjoy as many pleasures as we like, but be warned. The effects wear off through frequent use (or over indulgence) via a process of habituation. And because 50 per cent of the benefits are genetic or cultural -we get that from our parents - there's not much you can change.

* the engaged life. We become so absorbed in our work, parenting, leisure activities, games or romance, we enter a state of peak experience called Flow, where time flies and we are completely in harmony with the world around us.

* the meaningful life. We pursue relationships that make a difference to our lives. We apply our best strengths in the serv ice of a purpose greater than ourselves.

So here's a workshop that prescribes some of Dr. Seligman's positive approaches. The activities draw on skills quite unlike the expert-driven disease model:

1. Fun - Brainstorm a list of fun activities. Design a day when you can enjoy them all.
2. Gratitude - Write a testimonial to a person you have never properly thanked who did something enormously important that changed your life.
3. Build on strengths - Make a list of your five greatest strengths and your life partner's five greatest strengths. Then design/describe an evening/date with your life partner where you can make use of them.
4. Serving a higher purpose - Think of someone or some group in need. Design/describe what you will do to help them.
5. A beautiful day - Design yourself a beautiful day and use SAVOURING and MINDFULNESS to enhance the pleasures that flow from it.

Dire and not-so-dire-tribes

David Logan has been researching tribes for the past decade. Not the ancient or nomadic, but the tribes that dwell within 21st Century organizations.

He is the author of Tribal Leadership, the co-founder and senior partner of CultureSync, a management consulting firm. He also teaches management at the University of Southern California.

Logan says each of us lives in a tribe of 20 to 150 people. It's where all our work gets done and societies are created. Or so says his extensive research program involving 24,000 people in all kinds of organizations.

The yawning chasm between our widely differing tribal beliefs leaves organizations wide open for failure. It's no wonder we struggle to create new knowledge that is aligned with the emerging future. It's no wonder the collective jigsaw we create is often missing vital pieces. It's no wonder many people feel their opinions are never heard or acted upon. It's no wonder the future turns out to be different to what we expected. It's no wonder that some are able to say, "we told you so."



There are five tribal stages. Stage 1 (1% of us) is "Life sucks". Our members are desperate people who do whatever must be done, including bad stuff, in order to survive. Think gangs and prison inmates.

Stage 2 people (21%) believe "Our Life sucks". It's life on the treadmill, barely making ends meet, surviving by the skin of our teeth, the fun is always had by someone else.

Competitive, self-centered narcissists occupy Stage 3. That's 48% of us. We see the world through an "I'm great and your not" lens. It's all a zero-sum game. We believe that for some of us to gain, others must lose.

At Stage 4 (22%) "We're great". Our kind of people value creativity, having fun and "being a little bit weird". We find something to unite us, start doing stuff together, then we click as a group, and transform to a "we" kind of world. We shift from being motivated individualists to a tribe that performs remarkable feats. We are the first of the tribes to see ourselves as a tribe.

Just 2% of us ascend to Stage 5. For us, "Life is great". What we do is change the world. Our actions are determined only by our values. We serve a purpose, higher than ourselves. We comprehend all the levels, whereas lower level tribes can only understand the stage above or below them.

Tribal leaders have a role to play in expanding the influence of their tribes, nudging them forward to the next level. We also expand our influence by introducing other tribal leaders to each other.

The toughest task is to nudge Stage 3 tribes to Stage 4, from a zero-sum world to a world of abundance. For the fun-loving and creative stage 4 tribes there's not much incentive to go to the self-less noble life of a stage 5. Few make the journey anyway.

So here's a workshop to explore this space:

1. Brainstorm examples of each of the tribal stages. Stage 1 (Life sucks). Stage 2 (Our life sucks). Stage 3 (I'm great but you're not). Stage 4 (We're great). Stage 5 (Life is great).
2. What kinds of tribes live in your organization? Give examples.
3. If we believe "Life sucks" or "Our life sucks" why might our beliefs constrain what we can do with our lives/with our work?
4. You have the task of designing a corporate brainstorming event. All the tribes are mixed for maximum creativity. What must you do to ensure everyone "hears" each other?
5. How might tribes choose to differentiate themselves from tribes immediately higher or lower on the scale? Think about language, symbols, signs...
6. What kinds of cultural/communications difficulties might you encounter with a roomful of all the tribes?
7. Brainstorm a list of ideas to help/encourage/nudge Stage 3 (I'm great) people to explore the Stage 4 (We're great) tribal belief system.
8. Thinking about each of the stages, Stage 1 (Life sucks). Stage 2 (Our life sucks). Stage 3 (I'm great but you're not). Stage 4 (We're great). Stage 5 (Life is great), how could you get each stage to understand the beliefs/attitudes of the other stages?
9. You're the leader of a Stage 1 tribe, and can speak all the levels. What's stopping you from ascending to other levels?
10. What life circumstances might cause you to migrate to an early and unhappier stage of tribal development?
11. When you randomly introduce one person you don't know, to another person you don't know, how does that expand you and your tribes influence? Give examples of the possible effects/outcomes.

Mutual dependence or slavery?

Joshua Klein asks whether crows could be enlisted to do stuff for us like recover the millions of dollars worth of coins humans lose every year.

Or perhaps crows could learn to collect and dispose of garbage, the billions of pieces and tens of thousands of tons of packaging hurled out of car windows, that despoil our freeways and roads.

Thanks to us, crows are thriving. They have adapted, like rats and cockroaches, to benefit from human activities. They live everywhere that we do.

Crows are really smart. Really, really smart. Klein demonstrates how they quickly learned how to operate a "crow vending machine" that dispensed food in exchange for loose change.



Crow power presents a unique opportunity to offer a universal, standardized service, wherever they are located, which is everywhere, just like the internet, electricity and roads.

Perhaps crows could be enlisted to perform the repetitive and scalable tasks that we don't want to do. Collect certain kinds of bugs that eat crops most prone to attack. Trim hedges. Weed gardens. Harvest crops. Or clear gutters.

But the question remains, would such a relationship be really equal, one of "mutual balance" between humans and crows? Or would we humans be guilty yet again of enslaving a fellow species for our benefit.

Here's a workshop to explore the issues:

1. What other smart creatures could we enlist to help us perform useful roles for humans in a kind of "mutual interdependence"?
2. What are some of the repetitive tasks that crows could be enlisted to perform on our behalf, with a little training?
3. What is the boundaries/differences between "mutual independence", "slavery" and "service"?
4. What might be the possible consequences of enrolling many more other animals to become our servants of "mutual dependence" in addition to dogs, pigs, horses, cows and ducks?
5. What ethical issues does this idea of new "servant animals" raise?
6. For a long time, humans have asumed that what makes us different from other animals is our ability to evolve culturally as well as genetically. If crows clearly learn from each other (as do dolphins, monkeys etc), what differentiates us from these animals?
7. If we are only different from other animals by a matter of degrees what gives us the right to enslave/co-opt other species? Give your reasons why or why not.

Something out of nothing

Authors create their own universes, their own cosmology, says Amy Tan the mischievous author of The Bonesetters Daughter, The Joy Luck Club and Saving Fish from Drowning.

Which begs the question, "if there is a creator of the universe, is she a writer?"

Tan explains the ambiguity of the creative process to the TED crowd using a curiously warped interpretation of modern day physics. She equates the nebulousness or indeterminism of the creative act with the uncertainty principle of quantum dynamics and the "11 levels of anxiety" experienced by a writer with the 11 dimensions of string theory.

Tan jokes that creativity has three sources. Nature, nurture and nightmares. Nature involves some inherited genes. Nurture is a dash of childhood trauma. And the nightmares are the psychoses, depression and the temporal lobes seizures she personally has experienced.



Encouraged as a child to become a doctor or concert pianist, Tan chose to ignore her teacher's assessment of her literary talent of B/B+/B- grades and become an "artistic arranger of words".

On stage she is a living, breathing version of her own story telling process. She starts with nothing except some ambiguous concepts which seem unconnected - accidents, serendipity, ambiguity, balance, intentions, and peripheral exploring - then weaves them into a compelling narrative.

The creative act, she says, is about answering three questions. Why do things happen? How do things happen? How do I make things happen?

She asks if ideas turn up serendipitously just when you need them or do artists simply discover new ways of seeing the world and become aware of patterns that were already there.

She surmises the answer could be either/both, (just like the famous experiment where light passing through a slit behaves both as a particle and a wave - my words, not hers).

Tan also reveals that as she writes a story, she learns from the "life" experiences and interactions of the characters, and in doing so, she "becomes the story".

Over time, each story develops it's own internal consistency. She tells the story of meeting a man who created towers of rocks, large and small, perfectly balanced, one of top of the other, who explained the principle that "there is a place of balance" for everything in life.

But Tan also says that a light touch is required. Push too hard and creativity is stifled. Write around the periphery of what you don't know and something new emerges.

So here's a workshop to explore some of Amy Tan's ideas about the creative process?

1. What is the something in your nothing? What unusual pattern or thing have you observed/noticed or been amazed about lately to which you are attracted? e.g. the chewing gum stuck to the pavement.
2. Thinking about your unusual pattern/thing, in what other situations have you seen such a pattern, and why might it be interesting to others? e.g. the mess we humans leave behind, which we ignore in our daily lives.
3. Create a minor solar system of characters, and a scenario, to explore your interesting pattern/thing. e.g. the derelict sleeping on the pavement with accumulated junk/garbage all around, who dreamed of being a.....
4. How did your character get to be in this stuation?
5. As you start creating your character and the story, what can you now observe around you that you did not see before?
6. As you start creating your story, what do you learn from the character, and especially how does this learning enrich who you are?
7. If you were now faced with death, what stories do you now feel compelled to tell, as urgently as possible to your friends, family, the world?

Compassion and peaceful co-existence

Religious Historian Karen Armstrong made a 2008 TED Prize wish that has resulted in thousands of people around the world joining together to collectively create a Charter for Compassion so we can live together in peace, and leave the world in a better state for our children.

At the heart of all the world's religions is a Golden Rule, to "always treat all others as you'd like to be treated yourself. Yet religious people often ignore the Golden Rule at the heart of their belief system and define themselves by how different and right they are compared to others, rather than what they have in common.



When we don't live a compassionate life and go back to being thoughtless, selfish, spiteful and egocentric, we ignite the flames of hatred or mistrust. Such differences become a major source of conflict between the world's people. Then, when we discriminate against people on the basis of some perceived difference - their sexual orientation or gender - we become less than what we can be.

Living the compassionate life is not about feeling sorry for another - a narrow interpretation of compassion - but having the ability to to stand in another person's shoes and know how they would feel, and to be sensitive to how they see the world. When we live the compassionate life, we somehow transcend or transform ourselves, and become of greater value to each other and to the world.

Here's a workshop to explore the issues:

1. Describe how you like to be treated by others.
2. Describe all the the different ways you would NOT like others to treat you.
3. Give examples of what Rabbi Hillel, the contemporary of Jesus Christ, might have had in mind when he says "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor" when describing the Torah and all its ramifications.
4. Think about someone special who is very different to you. Step into their shoes. Describe them, their mental models, and how they might interact with the world.
5. Imagine yourself standing in that other special person's shoes, how might you now perceive your own mental models/world view?
6. What can you and that special person focus on jointly, to become friends so you and your two worlds can live in harmonious co-existence?

Seeing without sight

When we grow old and lose our sight, one-in-ten of our brains will invent images that can be both surprising and challenging.

Surprising because the "hallucinations" come and go suddenly. Challenging because we think we might be going mad.

Oliver Sacks, the famous neurologist, assures us that such people are not crazy. The brain is forming the images in the imagination, simply because "we see with the eyes and the brain as well".

When some people lose their vision, constellations of cells in their brains where millions of images are encoded, can become hyperactive. They start to fire off and you begin to see things. It's like a movie over which you have no control in the form geometric shapes, cartoons or people, often with accentuated features such as big teeth. Soundless and without a story line.



All you can do is watch, unlike psychotic hallucinations, which argue and interact with you.

Sacks explains that a mere 1% of us have the confidence to speak up about this kind of condition. Most of us keep quiet, worried that we might be diagnosed as "crazy" and locked up or given inappropriate treatments.

Sacks is best known for his heart-felt stories about brain malfunctions and how they change our lives. His best-selling book Awakenings, tells the true story of a group of patients, frozen like statues, unable to speak or move on their own, and how they responded to the "miracle drug" L-Dopa. The patients were survivors of the 1920s sleeping sickness epidemic, encephalitis lethargica. L-Dopa helped to unfreeze their movements, but only for a short time.

Sacks admits to experiencing some of the geometric hallucinations which, like his tinnitus (ringing in the ears), he tries to ignore.

So here is a workshop to explore some of the issues that arise from this talk:

1. Why, in these times of unprecedented knowledge creation, would people be fearful of revealing to their families and doctor, unusual events in their inner world?
2. Make a list of variations to the human condition where fellow humans might take action against you because of a condition or experience which seems weird, either out of fear or lack of knowledge.
3. What are some of the deep 'hidden assumptions" about variations in the way our bodies work that cause people to be mis-diagnosed or maltreated by the "caring professions" in some unreasonable way?
4. If the loss of capability in a functional network such as the human brain can stimulate "hallucinations" what might the declining capability in a social or corporate system produce, metaphorically speaking?
5. What kinds of fears/prejudices might we need to be aware of and guard against that could arise as a consequences of failing system capability that produces the metaphorical corporate/social equivalent of "hallucinations"?

The "true facts" about "carrots and sticks"

If creativity and productivity are going South in your organization it could be the "carrot and stick" incentives on offer.

Dan Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, shows there is a huge "mismatch between what science knows and business does" about getting the best out of people.

Business continues to use financial rewards designed for a late 19th and early 20th century workplace when higher pay, bonuses and other rewards (and punishments) improved productivity of workers engaged in routine and mechnical work, like the factory production line.



All this has changed. The old ways of rewarding people are not working any more.

A whole raft of scientific studies now show that financial and other incentives are the least effective way to reward the people in "right brain" jobs. It's all about solving wicked problems, creativity and creating new knowledge that can't be automated or sub-contracted to unskilled workers in low-cost countries.

For this kind of 21st Century work, the intrinsic motivators of "autonomy, mastery and purpose" deliver the most sensational results in postcodes like 95128 (Silicon Valley, CA) and 02139 (Cambridge, MA) and countries like Australia and India.

So knowing this, why do we still keep on paying the bankers of Wall Street and the CEOs of big companies huge bonuses to turn our financial system and our corporate sector into rubble?

Pink shows that knowledge and wisdom workers respond positively to the very human desire to exercise control over our lives, to do what we think is important, to choose our own directions. We also love to do it incredibly well and feel proud of our achievements. And do so in the service of a cause much bigger than ourselves.

It's the new way that up-and-coming software companies treat their employees. Instead of rules, time clocks and managerial control, it's ideas like "Fedex day" where all the programmers do whatever they please and create some new software fix/application overnight. And celebrate together over a beer. It's the amazing 50% of new software products coming out of Google produced during the 20% of the time they can do whatever they want. Its the amazing productivity of the millions of people who worked tirelessly to create Wikipedia, for NOTHING!

And, says Pink, it's not a socialist conspiracy. Nor a philosophy. But as Washingtonians would say, "a true fact".

Here's a workshop to deal with your productivity/creativity gap:

1. What's the mood of your organization, how does it feel about itself and what it does? Is it a party, a wake or something else?
2. List all the jobs in your organization where the staff are motivated by EXTRINSIC rewards (money, bonuses, sanctions etc.) and describe how they are rewarded.
3. List all the jobs in your organization where the staff are motivated by INTRINSIC rewards (autonomy, mastery and purpose) and describe how they are rewarded.
4. What programs (e.g. bonuses, piecework rates) does your organisation have in place to recognize and reward success at "left brain" routine work that can be automated?
5. What programs (e.g. FedEx days, celebrations) does your organisation have in place to recognize and reward success at "right brain" problem solving, decision making, improvement and creativity tasks?
6. Thinking about your "productivity/creativity crack/gap/gulf/chasm" (if any), what could you do NOW to allow your people take control of their lives, be brilliant, and serve a higher purpose?