Epilogue

A New Way of Being—at Work

We wrote this book to bend the world’s attention to a new way of being at work. In the past fifty years we’ve seen extraordinary transformations in our ways of doing at work—for example, in the ways we handle, sort, store, send, and receive data and information. As a result of the new technologies, the doing dimension of work has undergone a fundamental reorganization.

But even if you’re sympathetic to the idea that a business can go only as far as its people will take it, you would have every right to ask tough questions of people who advocate a dramatically new kind of investment in growing your business by growing your people. It might go like this.

These are fair questions, and they have lacked powerful rejoinders—until now.

But it isn’t for lack of trying. Fifty years ago, at the same time the digital age was being born, psychologists thought they were launching a similar revolution on the soft side with the birth of the human potential movement. It was a liberating reaction to the existing psychological paradigms, which were focused on human deficits and disorders. Psychologies of self-actualization, ego strength, and resilience emerged, promising to help us attend as carefully to psychological strength and health as we had learned to attend to psychological weakness and illness.

By any fair assessment, the human potential movement of the 1960s—like many other bold aspirations of that period—has fallen considerably short of expectations. Its current manifestations—positive psychology, strength-based approaches to assessment, and a view of human happiness fueling one version of the new incomes people seek from work—have an appealing optimism. But they have hardly proven an impressive engine for step changes in the realization of human potential.

The reason is that the human potential movement of the 1960s, and its current heirs, has never had a sufficiently rigorous theoretical base or scientific method. The study of human potential requires a genuinely developmental theory, one that can illuminate the gradual evolution of capabilities. Rather than see strengths and limits as absolute, immutable dichotomies, such a theory would recognize that over time a strength can become a limit that may need to be transcended.

But such a theory, as you now know, does exist. It was born at about the same time as the human potential movement, nurtured in university research labs, and originally focused on the study of child development; now it has become a powerful means for understanding the growth of consciousness and self-understanding in adulthood. Joined to more recent breakthroughs in neuroscience, it is being applied to animate practices and approaches to personal growth that have proven extraordinarily impactful, delivered in one-to-one designs for the benefit of disparate individuals.

What would it mean to make use of this same scientific foundation (whether or not one knew one was doing so) to transform our way of being at work? The answer to that question—the rejoinder to all the tough questions earlier—is what you are holding in your hands. We believe that the companies you have met in this book, taken together, coalesce to present a new image of work. That image, what we call the deliberately developmental organization, is a way for organizations and workers to become each other’s greatest resource for flourishing. That image may point the way to the same qualitative leap forward in the unleashing of human and organizational potential as the internet and computer represent for information processing and data transfer.

What you have seen in this book are pictures of real people—Nora, Jackie, Woody—working in real organizations—Decurion, Next Jump, and Bridgewater. They are all—the individuals and their organizations—becoming better versions of themselves. The companies are helping Nora, Jackie, and Woody grow; and Nora, Jackie, and Woody are helping their companies grow; in Decurion’s phrase, it is “all one thing.”

As you have seen, living out this one thing is hard—but not impossible. When we tell people about the DDO idea, someone always mentions human nature: “It’s only human nature to protect yourself, to want other people to think you’re better than you really are.” “What you’re talking about—people letting themselves be this vulnerable at work—is idealistic and naive. It’s a nice idea, but it runs contrary to human nature.”

This loose concept of human nature quickly gets extended to organizations as well. Apparently, they too have a human nature: “It’s unrealistic to think that businesses will devote this kind of time to their people when the going gets rough. The profit motive will inevitably trump all this personal growth stuff.”

Well, the people you have met in this book are not fictional characters, and they are not Martians; and they are not holding their breath, operating contrary to human nature for only a brief period. They have been at this for many years. The companies have been at this for many years.

So who defines “human nature”? How many more Noras and Jackies and Woodys—how many more DDOs, operating successfully for how many more years—does one need in order to recalibrate one’s definition of what is natural? Probably every genuinely disruptive idea in the world at first seems to fly in the face of taken-for-granted assumptions about immutable limitations. That is essentially what makes disruptive ideas disruptive. They do not disrupt only how we behave; they disrupt how we think.

As the authors of this book, we have had the privilege of learning from Decurion, Bridgewater, and Next Jump. Living with these unusual organizations and their people has disrupted the way we think, and how we feel. We have seen previously independent phenomena—the exterior and the interior; organizational improvement and individual improvement—inextricably linked, and that has made our thinking more whole. The inspiration of their example to bring the less developed sides of ourselves—along with our better developed sides—into our shared work has made us more whole in our humanity.

We warned you, at the start of this book, that meeting the DDOs might involve new ways of meeting yourself, because we’ve seen the same thing happen in ourselves. Setting out to discover strange lands, we came to reside more deeply within ourselves, in the spirit of Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi’s poem “The Guest House.”

At the start of this book we cheered for the new incomes people seek from work—salaries for the interior self (meaningfulness and happiness) as well as the traditional material benefits. We said there were centuries-old definitions of happiness, one that saw happiness as a state (of well-being, pleasure, the absence of pain and suffering). This is the tradition the better-known new workplaces are drawing on when they pay the new income.

But we said there was another tradition, one that sees happiness as a process (of our own unfolding, evolving, becoming better versions of ourselves). This definition welcomes more arrivals into the guest house. The pain of struggling well, of laboring toward new life, is not to be turned away, for it may be a guide to becoming the persons we are meant to be.

We wrote this book as an existence proof that there are indeed places for labor that can transform the meaningfulness of the single greatest use we make of the waking hours of our lives. We wrote it to create a spark of hope—and to see what might happen if we together blow that spark into a flame.