“When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our makeup as our appetite for status or money.”

So says Allain de Botton, the wonderful writer whose books I’ve eagerly devoured. With the benefit of hindsight it feels reasonable to say that it was just a matter of time before he turned his attention to the ‘pleasures and sorrows of work‘

With the inevitable evolution in our economies as we emerge from the current twin crises, climate change and economic, it is a better chance than we’ve had for a long time to ask questions about work and workplaces. We have taken it for granted that work can be drudgery as we participate in the machinery of industry.

Ergo’s development of the concept of generative workplaces has incorporated a variety of dimensions that have been well studied and understood, including workplace wellbeing and organisational health. But de Botton’s straight forward question above is the nub of it for me. A generative organisation is one that facilitates meaningful work.

On one level this is about stakeholder engagement. Especially staff. To what extent do employees experience meaning and joy as people in the course of their work? At another level it is about the meaningful contribution of the organisation to society. The two are clearly related, but the capacity of leaders to keep people connected with the greater social purposes of enterprise appear to be sorely lacking. It goes without saying of course that the tragedy is that many, many enterprise leaders have themselves lost touch with a vision and purpose beyond wealth generation.

I hope that the current climate might prompt more people to ask the meaning question in the prime of their careers, rather than having to walk the well worn path that throws up the questions as wallpaper for a midlife crises.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. How would you answer this question?

“What conditions allow you to experience meaningfulness in your work?”

I find myself sitting in McDonalds after one of the worst night’s sleep I can remember for a long time. Noisy kids (who go to bed later than their parents), barking dogs (own own), cats on the roof (our own) and the insomnia inducing restless thinking about the problems associated with running a small business, punctuated with dreaming about our first excursion in our new caravan (which I affectionately call our ”yurt’).

One of the little problems to be resolved today is associated with our partnership with Deakin University’s Org. Psych. Department. We are exploring a psychometrically valid instrument to assess the “generativity” of an organisation. This has emerged from our work over many years now to understand the phenomena which we have described as a generative organisation, and in particular, generative business. The problem we’ve got is that the established categories don’t fit. There are established models for “organisational health’, wellbeing in the workplace’, CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility), sustainability, ethics, and more. But when we talk about generativity we are talking about a combination of these and more …. not more broad, but more deep.

How do we not reinvent the wheel, yet do the nuances of our thesis justice? We want to assess the nature of organisations that enliven people, that energise people to produce the best they can from their core strengths in an environment in which they can be thoroughly themselves. In parallel with this generative organisations generate positive change in the community, society, market in which they operate.

Will let you know how we go.

I am anticipating a great event this weekend. Three amazing people (Steve, Pat and Mel) who have all worked with us at some stage, are running an event in Donkey Wheel House. (Donkey Wheel is an organisation, of which I am Chair, that is developing a social enterprise hub in the heart of Melbourne.)

Trampoline (www.trampolinemelb.com ) will bring together 100 energetic, intelligent people for an ‘unconference’. Check it out. I look forward to reporting on that too.

Long before the now mainstream action around climate change, there was recycling. The first ‘green’ behaviour that I recall was all about dealing more intelligently with our urban waste. It is time to revisit the whole idea with new vigour.

Reading Natural Capitalism  when it was released a few years back was the first time I was introduced to the idea of zero waste. Traditionally recycling has been about reducing the volume of landfill and being smarter about re-using the same materials. Paul Hawkins and others are now painting a vision that everything we manufacture is to return for whence it came. Further, the idea is that the manufacturer has accountability for the entire lifecycle of their product.

If you, like me, have thought that dealing with rubbish is a bit 70s, think again.

The Economist recently ran a special report on waste. An introduction article included this,

“The stretch of Pacific between Hawaii and California is virtually empty. There are no islands, no shipping lanes, no human presence for thousands of miles – just sea, sky and rubbish. The prevailing currents cause floatsam from around the world to accumulate in a vast becalmed patch of ocean. In places, there are millions of pieces of plastic per square kilometre. That can mean as much as 112 times more plastic than plankton, the first link in the marine food chain. All this adds up to perhaps 100m tonnes of floating garbage, and more is arriving every day.”

The article goes on to list an array of stories describing the unbelievable volume of waste that is accumulating around the world.

I have been musing about this in the context of digesting Thomas Friedman’s sharp little piece called The Inflection is Near? (Thanks to the Trevor, Mohan and Chris who, within 24 hours,  independently suggested I read this short NYTs article)  In it Friedman articulates so succinctly what many have been intuiting .. . 2008 will become known, not just for the GFC (Global Financial Crisis), but as the point in human history where we hit the wall – the time “… when Mother nature and the market both said: ‘No More’”.

We are on the cusp of deep and fundamental change.

We have lived a myth. Through the industrial revolution and the years beyond it, we have thought that we have been generating wealth. But real wealth is surely sustainable. It is not about a time constrained enjoyment of riches that sticks its head in the sand with respect to the prevailing reality. Instead of passing on wealth to our children and their children, we are passing on a world in decay. We have plundered limited resources to cultivate a way of life that we thought included endless growth and progress. The scrap heap is not a fantasy, it real. And as Friedman reminds us, “Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts.”

The current issue of Company Director is cover to cover about managing in the economic context of 2009. These are critical discussions. There is so much at stake when we are talking about jobs. But I am reminded that if the economic lens is the only one through which we assess the state of the world, and the only one via which we measure our success, they are gloomy days indeed.

Last night, as I braced myself for another week away from Maria and our four children, I reminded myself again that balance is not about working less … it’s about ensuring there are other things in life that solicit my best energies and passions. What is there in my life that I hang out to invest time and effort in. As much as I enjoy the challenges of business, I am lucky, lucky, lucky that I’ve got an amazing life outside ‘organisational effectiveness’. I hope the tough times cause us deep ponderance on what matters most in the scene of our whole lives.

After about 70 consecutive weekly posts, this week Monday came and went without a musing. I usually manage to quarantine some time … not this week. It happened to coincide with a dud post as we played around with our blogging software and let one through the net. Apologies.

Meanwhile, the balls I have in the air include being in PNG every second week, managing the business pressures of economic slowdown, all that goes with purchasing a caravan and vehicle to tow it with … not much margin in life at the moment.

I woke this morning knowing the best thing I could do was go for a swim. I lay there thinking about how easy to justify another 45 minutes rest. Sooo tempting. I’m glad now that I chose the swim … feeling ready to take on the day.

What do you find beautiful in the world?

I am at the end of four day stint in which unusual circumstances have me in four different states and another country. Peppered through the busyness of it all I have been involuntarily silenced by some random moments of beauty.

• On Friday, the beige hills in Dumbalk (South Gippsland, VIC) were the backdrop for a new but classically designed Australian house with veranda around most of what we could see. The owners told us the hills were green after the bulk rain in December … the driest January and February on record have scorched them, but the postcard beauty remained if more sober and with a sense of scarring.
• Still on homes … the sprawling old homesteads with outbuildings littered the country side in the warm early light as we flew low into Launceston airport Saturday morning. I regularly forget how beautiful that part of the world is.
• Backyard (or in this case front-yard) cricket on uneven dustbowl grass with kids who could hardly lift the bat and fathers whose competitiveness broke the surface with predictable regularity. Wonderful stuff. (I sport a multicoloured inside knee after the ball jagged to leg … my mind had me flicking it square towards the water tank … what actually happened was the size two bat wacking my knee and the tennis ball undeterred on its way to the keeper.)
• I thoroughly enjoyed John Hirt’s appreciation piece in the current edition of the Monthly. Rare indeed to see published a tribute to someone, in this case Professor Ian Harper, from a writer who is traditionally from a different point on the ideological and political spectrum. There is amazing beauty in authentic grace.
• A text message: I hugged the family as I left again yesterday for what in this season of life is regular business travel. I so didn’t want to be away. I turned on my phone when in transit in Sydney to discover a long text from one of my daughters offering sage-like advice about making the most of my opportunities and thinking about the long term benefits etc etc. It solicited a tear …
• Still in Sydney, this time browsing books. My heart leapt as I saw two in a companion series: 50 Mathematical Ideas You Need to Know, and 50 Physics Ideas You Need to Know. Skimming through them was like walking into an old fashioned ye olde lolly shoppe with favourites and new things to savour, I love the wonders of innovation, patterns and peculiarity that formed the content. Beautiful indeed.
• Pity I couldn’t think of anything beautiful about the steamed fish in8F that arrived midway through this post. … although, the family of five strung out to my left were talking about dinner as only novel holiday travellers do … there is some beauty in that but my emotions in relation to them are more of jealousy at the moment.

Beauty is everywhere. Have a good week.