The professionalism that will kill us all.
Or how to find our way back to life after being locked inside.
“The professionalism that requires us to be unmoved by what we meet through the day is a professionalism that will kill us all.”
Last night I met with some old friends (and new) in a clearing in the woods. We met to listen to each other, to talk, to ask for help — and to see if we might find our way to some kind of clarity in the face of difficult times.
For months now, we’ve found ourselves living in a world we didn’t expect. And just as it was disruptive finding ourselves in that world, now we‘re being disrupted again — as people emerge from isolation, as people take to the streets, as ‘normal’ life resumes. Meeting in the clearing, as each person told what was on their mind, we found ourselves walking a path through deepening levels of grief.
What do I do when the social events that normally punctuate my year might not happen? What do I do if I’ve got used to this way of working and can’t find my way back to how it was before? What do I do when loved ones are dying and I can’t be there with them?
At the beginning of the lockdown, I had a conversation with Michael Neill about the challenges of that first disruption — of everyday life being put on hold.
“It feels like there’s so much to process at the moment. There’s the normal stuff of everything that’s different that you have to work out how to do differently. But there’s also all of the context. All of the different subtle kinds of ground or culture and shared story that are moving. And it feels so hard to keep up. To find enough space to process all of that.”
And finding new ways to process all that was maybe one of the gifts of this time of constraint and isolation. As our time in the clearing drew to a close this week, Carianne raised a question I’ve heard a few people ask in recent days. If, amongst all the disruption, the constraint of lockdown has actually offered a rare kind of space and quiet, then how can I hold onto that quiet when everything opens up again?
We all came up with suggestions (you can hear them in the clip above), but then Franki Anderson (an old friend and teacher of mine) said:
Can I suggest you ask yourself: what cut your sensitivity down before the lockdown? Because if we were all allowed to be as sensitive as we truly are, we would make a much better society.
And it felt like landing.
The grief this little group was finding its way through was just a little scrap of all the feeling we might normally manage to live without acknowledging. All the feeling that there might not normally be room for in busy lives of work and travel and shopping and meetings and outings. So easy to feel that those days when the feeling erupts — as sorrow or overwhelm or worry or unrest — are the bad days. And that the other days, where we get everything done without feelings getting in the way are the good days.
As a teacher of fooling, dance and improvisation, Franki has devoted her life to guiding people gently from their busy everyday selves to the more sensitive (and creative) creatures they might sometimes forget how to be. Franki’s work starts from the question of: “How can you walk onto a stage with nothing at all and enjoy being there?” And the answer is finding your way back to that sensitivity. Learning (again) how to feel your way. How to move and be moved. How to listen to yourself.
For those of us well-trained in the art of being professional and planning and thinking and being in control it can feel like an entirely unfamiliar way of being. Because, we have somehow ended up with a concept of professionalism that has built-in the idea that sensitivity is unprofessional. This was actually the first thing I wrote about on Medium five years ago — We are not machines:
When we started working with machines, we started to work like machines. You start work at nine because the machines in the factory are turned on at nine. You work at a constant rate, because the machines work at a constant rate. If you’re tired or hungry or bored or itchy or sad, you don’t let it affect your work, because machines are not affected by tiredness or hunger or boredom or itchiness or sadness….
How many workplaces have you been to where the machine story is unquestioningly accepted as how work works? Where the qualities of a machine have become the acceptable qualities of a human at work?
The inner life is denied. Desire is repressed. Humanity is for after-hours… And cold, impersonal efficiency is rewarded. Predictability, uniformity and reliability are paramount. And the creative being is nowhere to be seen.
But we are not machines. We are creative beings. And this story of work, this story of machines, is no longer useful. It’s dead.
But, the thing is, it’s not dead. It’s killing us. The professionalism that requires us to be unmoved by what we meet through the day is a professionalism that will kill us all.
About fifteen years ago I started regularly going to Denmark to teach at the Kaospilots, a school of creative and social entrepreneurship. What I loved about the school was that, rather than teaching people to be ‘businesspeople’, they asked: What do you need to learn to live and work well in an unpredictable world? And so the students learned how to listen to each other. And how to listen to themselves. How to see what is happening and see what is needed — and feel able to respond. How to stand for something. They were learning how to be sensitive. How to be sensitive at work.
When I left the clearing last night, thinking of Franki’s words, I wrote two sentences on a post-it note:
“The insensitivity required to be part of the system is unsustainable. Without sensitivity to life as a whole, everything starts to die.”
When I met the Kaospilots I was excited because it was an opportunity for me to be more creative in my own work. It was a personal thing. I was happy to find a way to work that might suit me more. It was an alternative to mainstream business and business education. But, honestly, I think it might have taken me until last night to properly see: this isn’t a matter of finding a nicer, more enjoyable way to go to work. It’s a matter of seeing that a professionalism that has insensitivity baked in is abhorrent. And dysfunctional. And not fit for the world we find ourselves in.
The work I do — teaching clarity — is basically about finding a way to work that moves beyond that desolate and life-destroying professionalism. How can we do the work we need to do in a way that increases rather than blocks our sensitivity? What does professionalism look like when it is something you feel your way through, moment by moment? When it requires vulnerability and uncertainty? When being more professional means being more human? Kinder, wiser, more generous, more forgiving, more loving. And — not doing these things for their own sake, not doing these things because they’re nice, but doing them because that’s what works. Because, if we go to work and we‘re on autopilot, then everything starts to die.
You end up building a nice piece of furniture and destroying a bit of rainforest. You make a nice meal and help build an abbatoir. You sign up to protect and serve your community and end up killing them in the street. You get elected to lead your people — and then let 10,000s of them die.
“Oh! Now I know why I hate business books,” says my friend Floris. Because they are teaching you how to perform better, how to market better, how to be more efficient — without being sensitive to life as a whole. They’re teaching a kind of archaic, lethal professionalism. It’s like giving doctors textbooks from before we’d heard of antiseptic.
I know more and more people who are devoting their lives to building a culture on the far side of that professionalism. Laurence McCahill and Carlos Saba‘s Happy Startup School. Dougald Hine and Anna Björkman’s School Called Home. Liz Slade’s Unitarian Church. Sam Moyo’s Decolonial Mindset Training. Floris and his Gentle Revolution. Sally-Anne Airey’s Evolving Leadership Programme. Briony Greenhill’s Singing Place. Obviously these are just the people I happen to know. You probably know more — and even each of them probably has their own list of people doing that work.
But I know, for me at least, I’m trying to build a path out of professional insensitivity and falling into it again and again. Because professional insensitivity is how I learned to build things. It’s like trying to save a forest by burning it down.
And — here is the real kicker when it comes to professional insensitivity. Being insensitive means trying to work in a way that is detached and disconnected from the world as it is. And, yes, the first reason that that is a terrible idea is that it means you will make the wrong things, you will contribute to destroying the world you live in and you will suffer along the way. But the second reason is — it doesn’t even work.
There is a kind of power that only comes from being connected to the world. There‘s a Buddhist meditation practice — ‘tonglen’ or ‘taking and giving’ — where you deliberately wish to take on the suffering of others and give them whatever happiness you have. There’s a bit of an art to it. By connecting to their suffering, you’re connecting to the world. And, rather than making you suffer, connecting to the world gives you a power. The more you can feel what others feel, the more you can feel what is needed, the more you are able to do something about it. The greater your compassion is, the more powerful you become.
Compare The Tenors and Natalie Grant warbling their way professionally through ‘Amazing Grace’ in a concert hall in Las Vegas. Or Jennifer Hudson carving every single note of it out of the sky at Aretha Franklin’s funeral. And then decide what kind of professional you want to be.
Watch Dominic Cummings hollow excuses in the Rose Garden or Greta Thunberg’s bitter admonishment of world leaders at the United Nations. And decide what kind of professional you want to be.
Watch Killer Mike pleading with the people of Atlanta not to burn their city down, but to “plot, plan, strategise, organise and mobilise”. And try to convince anyone that a kind of button-up, business-suit, cold-blood presenter with a slide-deck and a clicker is more professional than that.
Every year in September I go to the Happy Startup Summercamp. It brings together all kinds of interesting souls trying to find their way to new ways of working. You get bathed in inspiration and fellowship and friendliness for three days and head home on a kind of wave of optimism and hope. Except, a few years ago, it fell to Kees Klomp to wrap things up with a final talk to send us on our way. And, rather than say how wonderful we all were, he told us it wasn’t enough. That, sure, maybe a lot of us had found our way to do work we were more passionate about. But if we thought that was the same as working with a purpose, then we were mistaken.
“Purpose is pain,” said Kees. If you want to work with purpose, then that means starting from the suffering you find. Starting from what’s needed. And then doing what is needed to relieve that suffering. And measuring your success on how well you do at that.
And that’s the professionalism we need. In the end, how did professional ever end up meaning anything other than doing what’s needed? And doing what’s needed means being sensitive to life as a whole. Your own life. Your home life. Your work life. The life of your community. Every life and every living thing.
I don’t know what happens next. I know I still find myself slipping into professional insensitivity. And I find myself trying to talk about my work in a way that makes sense to an audience of ‘insensitive professionals’ that I imagine are out there. But, really, I know they don’t exist.
Every human being is incredibly sensitive. It’s our gift. Making sense of things. Feeling our way. We’re like antennae constantly scanning the world for what’s needed next. It’s not that we can’t hear. It’s that we don’t listen. And the game we have to be playing is working out how to get better at that. Listening for the most subtle signals. Listening to each other. Staying close to what’s needed in each step we take and changing course when we need to. Moment by moment.
It’s not an optional extra. It’s not a communications workshop or a yoga session at lunchtime. It’s about changing what work means. It’s about destroying any notion that professionalism requires insensitivity. Because, as long as we treat that kind of professionalism as valid, then we are complicit in all of its crimes.
It has to change.
Bristol. 16th June 2020.
If you’d like to join me in the clearing one Monday evening, sign up at:
www.howtobeclear.com.
