Humane Resourcefulness
Rebuilding Organisations for Societal Value Creation
“Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.” – Bertrand Russell 1
This central finding from Gallup’s research published in February 2021 makes fascinating reading: “Work and life are more blended than ever. The new challenge of organizational culture is to address what organizations can do for the whole person – not just the worker – because all aspects of wellbeing matter to workplace culture, resiliency, and performance including career, social, financial, physical and community wellbeing.” 2
It seems that it’s taken a global pandemic for mainstream organisational thinking to wake up to what innovative, agile organisations have known for decades: organisations must be more humane if they’re to be truly resourceful in creating societal value. 3 4
I spent the early years of my career working in innovative, high-tech organisations, helping clients create conditions that brought together multiple people with different specialisms, strengths, and skills to cooperate and collaborate in co-creating new value.
In an increasingly fast paced, uncertain and unpredictable world, many more organisations now need to create similar cultures, where sense making, decision making & action taking are ever more tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded, and widely distributed throughout the organisation.
Unfortunately, most organisations still suffer from deeply embedded dogmatic adherence to practices and attitudes that are a legacy from when people were ‘hands’ or ‘labour’ working in factories alongside machines and equipment. 5
One such practice that remains ‘normal’ is hiring people to fit predetermined roles specified in job descriptions, including administrators and, more bizarrely, knowledge workers. 6
It’s just one amongst the many antiquated practices with the insidious effect of thwarting the three basic psychological needs essential for healthy human functioning, development, wellbeing, motivation, and resourcefulness.
Those three needs are for: Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness. 7
Autonomy is experienced when we feel ourselves to be causal agents of our own lives, as opposed to feeling like pawns in someone else’s game or a means to their ends.
Competence is experienced when we’re mastering activities that matter to us as individuals and/or co-create value with others.
Relatedness is experienced when we feel connected in worthwhile ways to others. 8
In Future-Fit Cultures
How do autonomy, competence and relatedness feature in future-fit cultures of tightly coupled, embedded, distributed, iterative sense making, decision making & action taking?
Autonomy is experienced when people feel appropriately and adequately involved in sense making and decision making so that any action taking makes sense.
Competence is the feeling of being effective in action taking, contributing to sense making and decision making, and co-creation of value with others, especially when the value created feels more than the sum of the individual contributions.
Relatedness is pivotal because effective sense making inevitably means combining our individual perspectives with the diverse perspectives of others in ways that enrich sense making, mutual understanding, respect and camaraderie. 9
It’s easy to see why the outside-in, one-size-fits-all methods of traditional consulting firms thwart basic psychological needs:
By imposing their “best practice” approaches, external consulting firms prevent people in the organisation from effective involvement in sense making and decision making. This impoverishes autonomy.
By bringing in large numbers of their own junior consultants to do the heavy lifting, they prevent people in the organisation from action taking that builds their competency muscles. 10
By inserting themselves between senior management and various departments and functional units, they actively prevent people from collective sense making and decision making, destroying relatedness.
Every organisation is unique and creates its own characteristic culture when its people develop their individual and collective resourcefulness.
How can you encourage the emergence of your organisation’s unique future-fit culture by enhancing autonomy, competence and relatedness?
One foundational resource that internal organisational change agents often find helpful is described in this 6 minute video on encouraging widespread adoption of 2D3D mindsets.
It explores why traditional organisational attitudes impede autonomy, competence & relatedness, leading to misunderstandings, misalignments, mistakes, missed opportunities, friction & inertia, causing organisational decline.
It explains how to cultivate mindsets that support autonomy, competence & relatedness and the spirit of cooperation & collaboration instead, leading to new insights, ideas, experiments and initiatives and building an adaptive, agile, resourceful organisation that creates significant new societal value.
From The Russell-Einstein Manifesto, issued in London on 9 July 1955 by Bertrand Russell and signed by 11 prominent intellectuals and scientists, most notably Albert Einstein.
Gallup Workplace Study, February 26, 2021
From Human Resources to Humane Resourcefulness - Rebuilding the Organisation for Societal Value Creation is the title of the keynote I delivered at the HR Tech Fest Congress on 29th September 2021.
‘Humane’ and ‘human’ were originally interchangeable, both meaning “pertaining to human beings” and “having qualities befitting human beings”. By the mid-15th century, humane had acquired the flavour “courteous, civil, obliging”, and by the 18th century its current sense of “marked by tenderness, compassion and a disposition to treat others kindly”.
This is well captured in the Henry Ford quote: "Why is it that I always get the whole person when what I really want is a pair of hands?" - cited by C. William Pollard in The Soul of the Firm (1995).
‘Father of modern management’ Peter Drucker (1909-2005) spent decades banging this drum. Here’s what he said 54 years ago in The Effective Executive (1967, p67) “To make people’s strengths productive is the unique purpose of organisation. It cannot, of course, overcome the weaknesses with which each of us is abundantly endowed. But it can make them irrelevant”.
From Self-Determination Theory (SDT): “To the extent that the needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness) are ongoingly satisfied, people will develop and function effectively and experience wellness, but to the extent that they are thwarted, people will more likely evidence ill-being and non-optimal functioning.”
It can be useful to consider relatedness in terms of the Great Place to Work (GPTW) research of Robert Levering in the 1980’s. This identified three components of a GPTW - 1) Trust in senior executives; 2) Pride in the organisation; 3) Camaraderie with colleagues. All three have a direct and cumulative impact on Relatedness.
Many people are familiar with the popular book ‘Drive’ by Dan Pink which retained Ryan & Deci’s Autonomy, changed Competence to Mastery (which is near enough the same) but changed Relatedness to Purpose. Unfortunately, Purpose can be highly individualistic and risks overlooking the vital value of “none of us is as smart as all of us” captured in the research-based findings on Relatedness.
This is unfortunately unavoidable in big consulting firms, which are based on the finders, minders, grinders business model. I describe this in detail on pages 14-16 of my free 22-page report on the Five Fatal Habits that have consistently prevented organisations from creating future-fit cultures for more than 30 years.