Be Alive!

“Keep awake, alive, new. Perform the paradox of being hard and yet soft. Survive without calcification of the tender membranes. Be a poet. Be alive.”

– Tennessee Williams

We can all get lost in poorly run large organisations. The flurry of people, process, policy and performance management can suck all the life and ambition from work. If we let all those constraints overwhelm our sense of purpose, our agency, and our empathy we can calcify over time.

Organisations spend fortunes on leadership, creativity and innovation programs only to deny people the agency to implement the change those skills demand. That denial is rarely explicit, it results from an accumulation of minor barriers, social disapproval, and lack of psychological safety to try to make change. Put enough discouragement around your organisational change agents and people’s natural instincts to make things better and more human will calcify.

Ambition withers if not encouraged and rewarded. Effort erodes when the challenge is too hard, giving extra is discouraged and the penalties for failure are high.

In this short Life
That only lasts an hour
How much – how little — is
Within our power

– Emily Dickinson

Being alive involves embracing our agency to realise personal and organisational purposes. Being alive involves practising our values and our empathy in our relationships with customers, partners and colleagues. Being alive means people having the freedom to either make things better in their work or to campaign for others to make those changes.

These are capabilities inherent in every person. Outside of work people do these things with ease. These are not capabilities that we need to teach. What is missing is practice. That practice is missing because people have settled into a narrow range of work due to real or perceived restraints on their freedom to make a difference.

To be alive: not just the carcass
But the spark.
That’s crudely put, but…
If we’re not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?

Gregory Orr

People surrender their lives and their agency to the machinery of organisations around them unless rescued by leaders who encourage them back to life.

To help people to be more alive, leaders need to remove the barriers and restrictions, real or self-imposed. Leaders need to create an environment where people feel confident and supported to make positive change in their work for customers, partners and colleagues. People will drive change to make work better given the chance, the systems, and the encouragement. We need to give people the opportunity and get out of their way.

People given the opportunity to be truly alive see performance and engagement skyrocket. They weed out the stupidity, the lack of empathy and the process nonsense that breeds in organisations. These high-agency individuals become focused on delivering improvements at speed. They love their work and can see the rewards for themselves and for stakeholders.

Be Alive. Never let yourself or others calcify. It’s never too late to help others to find the spark of life in their work and make work better for all.

Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical;

don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion.

Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

– Franz Kafka

a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it

Ada Limon, from Instructions on Not Giving Up