The Future of Work Lies at the Intersection of Flow, Income, Meaning and the Popularization of Entrepreneurship

Some thoughts on labor on this its day.

One of my heroes, Deming, used to argue that the worker deserved to take pride in her work. To feel proud of what you do you have to feel like it matters, it is valued, and that it represents your best.

One chief difference between work and a hobby is pay. One reason I like markets is that it is a way for the community to signal what it values. You may want to write another folk song but what the folks in your neighborhood will actually pay for is someone who can solve the problem of getting them food at lunchtime or to devise a better solution for running rainwater off of - or collecting solar energy onto - their roof. Pay is the community conspiring to vote on what would be valuable to them and not just to you. That makes us all a little more relevant, forcing us outside of ourselves.

One of my other heroes, Csikszentmihalyi, studied the psychology of engagement, what he called flow. It turns out that we're happiest when we're doing something that requires our full attention. When we're in flow we face clear goals, there is a balance between our skills and the challenge we face, we are free from distractions, we are animated by clear - rather than conflicted - priorities, there is a perfect overlap between what we're thinking about, wishing for, and doing, we are not worried about failure (one's mind has no room to simulate that outcome, so fully engaged is it in the task at hand), we lose track of time, the activity becomes worth doing for its own sake, and the self becomes more developed as the result of this state of flow, this absorption in the task.

Flow is a fabulous thing but for many it is easier to find in a video game than in work. A video game provides little meaning, though.

A task is meaningful if it serves a purpose bigger than that task. One guy might be cutting stone and the guy beside him - engaged in the exact same task - may be building a cathedral, be glorifying God. Sometimes meaning is simply a matter of framing your work as something bigger than the task at hand. More often it is being animated by what a difference your work makes in the lives of others, even in the lives of future generations.

As we become more affluent, we may rather paradoxically define ourselves even more by our work. Identity is often bound up in our job and in answer to the question, "What do you do?" we rarely say, "Stay current on politics," or "Read all of Michael Connelly's new novels." We tell folks what we do for a living. But as work becomes less essential to covering the necessary costs of life, we may expect that we not just get paid in money but in flow and meaning as well.

Faulkner wrote, “You can’t drink eight hours a day. Or make love. Work’s about the only thing a fellow has to do to keep from being bored” We have a number of examples of folks in the modern world who have made more money than they can spend and yet a great number of them continue to work. I suspect that we peons will follow their example and increasingly demand of our work these elements of pay, flow and meaning even as incomes rise.

Video game designers, TV producers, and designers of social media know how to capture and hold attention. What I suspect will define much of the modern corporation is that it will distinguish itself not by the products it designs - its employees will do that - but by its design of work so that employee efforts create income, flow and meaning. The founder of companies in the early 1900s became wildly successful by designing products like safety razors and automobiles. I suspect that we'll look back at the founder of successful companies in the early 2000s as successfully designing work to attract the best and brightest.

Keep in mind that Facebook, Twitter and Instagram aren't producers of any content in the same way that Newsweek, CBS or the New York Times are. They are platforms. I think that corporations in general will take on a similar relationship with employees in the future, focusing on creating great work rather than great products or services, positioning themselves as a platform rather than maker of products. This is part of what I mean by the term, "the popularization of entrepreneurship." Employees will create the new products, services and businesses that generate new jobs and wealth. The corporation will create the systems and roles that facilitate those outcomes.

Work matters. Profoundly. It has the potential to define us as much as anything else in life. Think of the people who stand out in history, people as different as Picasso, da Vinci, Marie Curie, Maria Montessori, Beethoven, Bjork, and Kurt Vonnegut. We know them through their work. Work is key to how we become who we are. And just like us, our labor continues to evolve. I suspect it will matter even more in the future than it does now.

Happy Labor Day!

Where Economic and Psychological Progress are at Odds (a partial explanation of how obviously bad policies can make for good politics)

Trump listens to his gut. While he may not be self-made man, his facts are, and he shows a disinterest in sustained thinking or nuanced thoughts.

His reliance on instinct and disdain for theory has taken him past what we know of how economies work to what he feels about how individuals feel about psychology of work. Freud could better explain Trump's economic policies than could Keynes.

Over the last couple of centuries, the economy has obviously made us more prosperous. Our prosperity from our work has increased more obviously than our contentment, though. What has obviously worked economically has less obviously worked psychologically. This is partly because of division of labor.

Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, the book that was arguably the first to define capitalism, opens with the account of division of labor as a force that had multiplied productivity.

THE greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour … seem to have been the effects of the division of labour. ,,,, To take an example ... the trade of the pin-maker. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving, the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands ... Each person... might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day …

By Smith’s calculation, division of labor bumped up productivity somewhere between 240 to 4,800 times. As Smith’s Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, for the first time since the ancient Greeks, productivity began to rise in the West.

If anything, this process has accelerated and deepened. This month I'm working with a client's product development team intent on rolling out a next generation computer chip that can be used in self-driving cars. The team involved in planning includes a couple of folks from Scotland, a couple from India, one from Malaysia, a couple from China and one from Austin, TX. The team working on project tasks includes an even larger swath of countries. 

We don’t just divide labor to focus on different tasks within a factory. We now divide labor across continents.

But this comes with a price. What makes us more affluent makes it more difficult to be engaged. Division of labor makes it harder for employees to see – or experience – how their tasks feed into finished products. And when a product is dependent on the efforts of so many people, it becomes harder to feel as though your own efforts make a difference.

Obviously gales of creative destruction that obsolete jobs, companies and even whole industries are the most visible element fueling the support for Trump’s promise of a national economy that won’t lose jobs to overseas competition. I suspect, though, that this curious alienation that comes from the steady division of labor that has started with pins and extended to transistors so small that their state can be changed by subatomic particles (true story), is a big part of why we don’t feel more certain of the gains that have come through this process that has made us part of a global economy.

Trump's protectionist policies will stymie this force for progress. His economic policies are awful. To me, the fact that policies which reverse the increased specialization and global trade take us backwards is hardly worth arguing. (Although I have argued it here.) The bigger question is why Trump's anti-trade policies won so many converts. I think the answer is, in part, psychological. Progress has made us more affluent; it has also made it harder for us to be engaged in our work.

Csizkzentmihalyi reported on a studies of where people find flow. People doing more traditional work like farming are more likely to find flow - or engagement - work. People doing more modern work are more likely to find flow in leisure. Tasks that we can see the whole of - building a cabinet or sheering sheep or cooking a meal - are tasks that are easier to find flow in than tasks that are merely some small part of a larger process. 

What does this mean? Economic progress is at odds with psychological well being. As our work becomes more specialized and we're more productive, we run the risk of becoming less engaged in our work and less happy. 

I do think there is a fix for this and it goes back to Csikszentmihayli's work on flow. For the last 100 years - well, at least the last 50 years or so -  we've focused on the quality of the product, what we experience as consumers. At its current peak of evolution, this focus on what customers experience with your product is called UX, or user experience. It's a big deal and rightfully so. It's a big part of how we've made the post-Adam Smith rise in productivity translate into more happiness as a consumer. What's next? We focus on our work as producers. We can create video games that engage and delight; we can also design work - just as we design products - to engage and delight.

I won't pretend that the only problem with globalization is that specialization can lead to stronger feelings of alienation than more traditional work. I will say, though, that as we become better at designing work to engage us when we are wearing our producer hat, jobs and work will become less a matter of angst and anger than it has in recent decades and will make it easier to sustain support for a process that has not only made us more affluent than our ancestors but more affluent than they could even imagine.

Flow as the Compass for Social Invention

We’ve now reached a curious and potentially powerful point in history in which our social reality will be less defined by any one dominant institution or certain traditions than the act of intentionally engaging in social invention. It will, however, be social invention to a particular end.

A lot of our practices are about imitating. This is the opposite of inventing. We don’t call it imitating. We say that we’re studying principles of organizations and looking to apply what is proven or successful. But we’re imitating.
The problem with this and the practice of it is perhaps seen most readily in our approach to work within organizations.

In his book, Good Business, Csikszentmihalyi quotes Robert Shapiro, former CEO of Monsanto. He makes a critical point about how individuals are fit into organizations.

“The notion of job implies that there’s been some supreme architect who designed this system so that a lot of parts fit together and produce whatever the desired input is. No one in a job can see the whole. When we ask you to join us, we are saying, ‘Do you have the skills and the willingness to shape yourself in this way so that you will fit into this big machine? Because somebody did this job before you, somebody who was different from you. Someone will do it after you. Those parts of you that aren’t relevant to that job, please just forget about. Those shortcomings that you have that really don’t enable you to fill this job, please at least try to fake, so that we can all have the impression that you’re doing this job.’”

“It’s a Procrustean concept, and it studiously and systematically avoids using the most valuable part of you, the part of you that makes you different from other people, that makes you uniquely you. If we want to be a great institution, that’s where we ought to be looking. We ought to be saying, “What can you bring to this that’s going to help?” Not, ‘Here’s the job, just do it.’”

What does Shapiro mean by “a Procrustean concept?” Procrustes was a figure in Greek mythology who forced travelers to fit into his bed by stretching their bodies when they were too short or cutting off their legs when they were too long. It is probably true that the vast majority of employees are both stretched to the limits of their capacity in some aspects of their job and literally cut off from real and crucial parts of their self in others. In either case, fitting into a job in such a way does little to realize their own potential or, by extension, the potential of the organization.

In fact, such programming of one’s actions is antithetical to what any society would hope to see emerge: genius. “One admires genius because one has the imagination to see that there is no mechanism in him or his work, nothing that can be analyzed and rationalized, ” Barzun writes. Again, imitation is the opposite of creativity, a way to suppress genius.

And yet tailoring even a job to the individual is something we rarely do. We prod students, congregants in church, employees, and citizens into a particular way of being. We are focused on what is “best” without regard for what is unique.
But what if the purpose of social inventions like church, school, and business was to provide a forum for the individual to realize his potential and not simply realize the vision of some leader?

In this world, the guide to progress will be rooted in the psychology of engagement, in what makes us most happy.

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi has spent decades studying what makes people most engaged. He has called the state of engagement “Flow” and has found that it is in this state that people are most happy, most creative and from which people are most likely to emerge more able and developed. In short, the path of flow – found in challenges that stretch us beyond those in which we feel in control (much less bored) and less than those that make us feel anxious (much less overwhelmed) – is the path to self development. It is by following the path of flow that we find our own unique path and realize our potential.

If you can imagine a world in which learning and work follow the path of flow for the individual, you can begin to imagine a world in which social invention is necessary – where work and learning are as dynamic as a video game that raises the challenge as the gamer gets more skilled. This world is not chaotic, but it certainly is not static or generic.

And such a world is congruent with the basic theme of progress since about 1300: increased autonomy. We have increasingly given the individual more options and more freedom on how to construct his own life.

Accomplishing this will require massive amounts of information that is custom to the individual. That is, this kind of world could only sit atop an information age. There are a great number of obstacles to creating such a world but the major obstacle at this point in history is simply awareness: very few people are aware it is possible or even that is desirable. It’s time we ended this. Pass the word along. It’s time we stopped settling for somebody else’s life and created the context for our own.

Love, Meaning & Flow

Bernard didn’t even pause to sip his coffee. “You thought it was a crisis of meaning," he told me as I was sitting down, not even wasting his breath on a simple Hello. "You think you can approach things philosophically. It isn’t a crisis of meaning and you can’t just approaching things philosophically.”

I was in a foul mood and had not wanted to meet Bernard. I responded with a serious tone, “It isn’t? What are you babbling about, Bernard?”

“You think this is a crisis of meaning. It isn’t. It’s a failure of love, not philosophy. You can’t approach everything philosophically.”

“Sometimes love seems so overrated.”

“That is such a condescending way to put things. Do you really think so lightly of love?”

“No,” I said, feeling like maybe I did but not wanting to admit it. “I mean, human beings need something more than just affection. Life has to have some kind of meaning for people. Even puppies can love.”

“Ha! You think that meaning is just about meaning? Meaning doesn’t stand alone. In fact, meaning itself is not a thing - it is just a web, a way to connect things.”

“Bernard, could you be more convoluted today?” I asked, seriously ready to just walk away and noticing for the first time that Bernard could be classified as an old fart.

“You want a happy life? You want to feel better than you do right now?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Then first thing, accept some coaching. You either change feedback or it changes you. I’m trying to give you feedback.”

“I’m all ears.”

"Your ears are kind of big. And you know what? Ears keep growing – right up to the time you’re my age."

“Great,” I tried not to smile. His stupid humor was kind of cheering me up, which I found annoying in my present mood.

“Use your ears. Shush.
“First of all, you want happy, you learn from Csikszentmihalyi. You find flow, or engagement in events. You lose yourself in tasks. Good. But if the happiness from flow is going to last, these tasks have to have some meaning."

“That’s what I said,” I retorted, a little miffed that he was trying to advise me with my own advice.

“Lesson one: this is not about you, so just listen.”

“Got it,” I said churlishly.

“Sometimes you think you do. Got it. And just remember, anytime you start feeling confident, it just shows how little attention you are paying. But what is meaning?”

“I can talk now?”

“Yes. I asked you a question. What is meaning?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know. Now you are talking sense.
"You look up the meaning of a word and what do you find? Other words. The meaning of words is just more words, which at some level makes no sense – at some level, meaning seems meaningless. It's just a web of connections. But when you read the other words, you learn what the word means. Meaning comes out of the interaction of one word with other words. Meaning comes out of relationships. This is just like life.”

“Life is meaningless?”

“No, you twit. Life has meaning when one life connects to other lives. So, if you want happy, you need two things: flow or engagement in the moment or in tasks; and a sense of meaning, a sense that your activities, your own life, connects to other people, to something bigger.”

Why are you telling me this? I told Life Hiker this a few weeks ago.”

“Sure, but if all you have is these pieces, they eventually collapse. You missed the most important and final piece of the happy puzzle."

“I did?”

“You did. And I don’t know why these things surprise you. You’ve missed more than this, but this is important. If you wake up one morning and realize that you don’t feel for anyone, it sucks all the meaning out of your life. Flow is unsustainble without meaning; meaning is unsustainable without love. You can't stay engaged in meaningless tasks and you can't sustain meaning without love.”

“So, all this to say that we need love? What is this, Bernard, you’re writing for Hallmark now?”

“You have no idea how stupid you look in the very moment you are feeling so smart,” Bernard told me, looking disgustedly at me.

“But you don’t just wander around passing out love like advertising brochures. Love has to be earned and sometimes people you are supposed to love are so far from lovable. What about when you just don’t feel like loving them?”

“’Don’t really feel like love,’” Bernard mocked me. “You think that people need to be worthy of love?”

“Well sometimes they’re so petty or jealous or full of contempt…” I trailed off.

“Because of that, they don’t deserve to be loved?”

“Yes,” I said, feeling like sticking it to him.

“Well, you are right,” Bernard said, surprising me. “They don’t.”

“So you agree with me?”

“No one deserves to be loved, really. I mean, not if you get technical about it.”

“My point!” I exalted. “So, when love fails we become philosophical.”

Bernard snorted. “Could you be more dense?” he stared at me. “Have you not heard a thing? Philosophy depends on meaning and meaning is all meaningless if the connections you make are to people you don’t love. You don't love because deserve to be loved. You love because it gives your life meaning. No philosophy can save you from a failure to love.”

“So we love to find meaning?”

“Well, yeah. That and it simply feels so much better to love than not love."

I paused a long time, letting my ugly feeling slowly drain from me. “So, love is better than philosophy?” I asked.

“Love is a philosophy, you twit.” And at last, his coffee now cold, Bernard took a sip.

The Argument Against Living Your Life Fully

“The purpose of life is to fart around. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”
- Kurt Vonnegut

We've embraced the notion of living a full life. Well, at least in public. I'm working 24-7, we brag to anyone who will listen. And of course, this is a lie and that is just one of the things wrong with the whole notion of living life fully.

Rather than 24-7, it might make more sense to live life from peak to peak. This suggests a life punctuated by bouts of love making rather than hours and hours of hand holding, or a mad sprint in a race of seconds rather than a stroll that goes on and on and on for hours. Peaks are not only wonderful - they demand recovery time that looks suspiciously slack jawed and glazed eyed.

And the more we scale these peaks, the more readily we can repeat the trick of finding those peak moments that distort time, cause us to lose self consciousness, and let only the task at hand command our attention, finding our perfect balance between challenge and skill. It is through these peak experiences that we are actualized. And it is from these peak experiences that we need to recover.

For one thing, post-peak order is the opposite of post-traumatic disorder. Peak experiences are hard to attain and impossible to maintain, but once we've had them, we feel more alive, more sure about our life's direction and purpose. Peak experiences lend clarity to life that would be lacking in an "every day is the same" kind of life.

The creative cycle includes peak moments and time that seems, on the surface, wildly unproductive. Aha! moments are preceded by incubation (which is preceded by immersion in a topic and problem set). The Aha! is a peak moment when things click to take shape, but incubation looks about as productive as a chicken sitting on eggs. And yet without this incubation time, its rare that anything pops out of the "ain't there" ether into the plane of existence, that miracle of creativity.

Lest the reader think that I'm just making all this up, offering this odd notion that one's life is best spent in a state other than flat-line exertion, allow me to quote from Warren Buffet, who, last I heard, is worth about $35 billion, a net worth that usually suffices as an attention-getting device in this world.

Think of yourself as you go through life as standing at the plate and people throwing you pitches. It is a very special baseball game. There is no one calling the balls and strikes and you can stand there forever. You have got all these people in the bleachers saying, "Hey, swing you bum!" on every second pitch. You just have to learn to ignore them and when a pitch comes along and it is straight but it is a little high inside, you let it pass. Another one comes along and it is a little low outside. Every once in a while a pitch comes along that looks like the sweetest, juiciest, fattest pitch you are ever going to see. And when it does, you swing from your heels on it. You come out of your shoes on it. That is how you go through life. And you are only going to get about ten swings like that, maybe five swings. That is what you wait for. Too many people go through life batting at every other pitch. So just wait for your opportunities and when they come you swing from your heels.

Don't live your life fully. Don't swing at every pitch so that you're exhausted when that juicy pitch finally comes across the plate. Instead, go from peak to peak and shamelessly savor the valleys in between.