5 Conversations For Human Work

  1. Aspiration development: work begins here where an aspiration story is open. What is our mission? Objective for the next 5 years? This is missing in Singapore.

  2. Work: build competencies, meaning and purpose

  3. Safety: when friction and conflict happens in the natural course of diversity, people will complain. The critical thing here is that it fixes nothing. As long as there are others who are also complaining, “I am right and I feel safe”.

    There is no maturity in this space - maturity comes from perspective. In the online space, these are echo chambers. We have a human need to go there. This is about fitting in.

    E.g, lunch groups at the office

  4. Healing / belonging: in the space where safety is found, capabilities need to develop for healing. You can be who you are and belong anyways. If you can see me for who I am and take me anyways, I belong. Contrast this with fitting in above.

  5. Power and Politics: this happens after safety if healing does not take place. “this sucks, want to challenge and change the system”. E.g racial politics. Leads to a desire to change aspirations. What happens when you feel you don’t belong. Who gets to decide because this system is not serving me.

    This is not necessarily bad, e.g water cooler conversations.

The first 2 are on the table, while the rest are typically under the table.

There’re 2 ways that conversations could go:

  1. Aspiration ➡ work ➡ safety ➡ healing
  2. Aspiration ➡ work ➡ safety ➡ power and politics ➡ back to aspiration
    • When there is safety, there is a tendency to not want to proceed with healing, which always comes with pain. Also requires skill in the system.

Examples:

  • A child is not doing homework because the conversation to set up an aspiration that the child then owns is missing. Often, parents proceed to talk about work, skipping the aspiration conversation entirely.

    This is equally applicable in the work setting - systems are dysfunctional because of lack of aspiration conversations, not due to the work being done. Some things could be assumed, not agreed on.

  • Racial politics and Trump’s election campaign are examples of what happens when after safety, healing is not done and there’s a desire to redefine aspirations.

Intervening in these factors is done through the appropriate container.

Psychological Safety

If people feel unsafe in the system, setting containers for these conversations is one way of creating safety.

For example, a group of people feel unsafe in a healthcare system due to the disruption caused by covid19. One of the leaders created a smaller group and in that group, everyone committed to “being there for each other”. Within that group, people could experience abundance and safety. It is fascinating how this linguistic act could cause such a profound change.

Marking this a stub because I haven’t been able to find any references about this in the literature to do further research.

logo