Year: 2021

Hootsuite’s flagship office in Vancouver reconfigured to envision post-COVID future of work

As more companies shift to hybrid work models, the design and functionality of the Vancouver office has changed —— especially for employees at Hootsuite.

vancouversun.com

“We asked employees what they were looking for as the pandemic gets more under control,” said Tara Ataya, Hootsuite’s chief people and diversity officer. “While free snacks and PingPong tables may have cut it pre-pandemic, post-pandemic culture will require companies to becomes catalysts for a healthy environment.”

“We also know that not everyone who comes in will do so all of the time,” Ataya said. “Healthy employees are those who are given the time and space to be that and that’s also why we’ve increased benefits six-fold for mental health services during the pandemic.”

“It’s not just about looking at the physical space of the office but paying attention to the physiological well-being and safety of people working there,” Ataya said.

As I’ve always noted about Hootsuite in the past, they’re focus isn’t so much Social Innovation as it is just Social Media. That said, these changes are a step in the right direction but still don’t get to the heart of how organizations need to transform themselves today. Thus many will hype mental health, yet do everything except the very thing necessary to improve it.

As an example, you can introduce all the mental health programs and physical spaces in your company for people to practice their mental health but if you don’t provide people with the additional time and space for it, nothing really changes.

In fact, by putting these mental health “expectations” on them with no time to practice them, it can actually make people feel even more overloaded and stressed out than before (as I noted my wife was experiencing at her workplace).

To really make a difference to their well-being, people need more time and space to do their actual work, rather than being asked to do more work with the same or even less time. That’s where the biggest change will occur. By giving people the flexibility to have more time and space for their work, it will create a greater psychological sense of space within them, helping them to feel like they can breathe more easily both emotionally and mentally.

Review: Welcome to Oh Carolina Café & Grocery, a modern and timely rendition of the old-fashioned corner store, and more

Oh Carolina Café & Grocery, Collective Goods Bistro & Grocer and La Quercia Deli have been following (and are thriving with) a new business model brought on by the pandemic

www.theglobeandmail.com

At the venerable La Quercia in Kitsilano, co-owner Adam Pegg didn’t just put a corner aside. He turned the entire dining room into a deli on wheels.

By day, he sells fresh-rolled pasta, sauces, prepared meals, sausages, wild mushrooms, sandwiches, select pantry items and wine.

At night, he rolls the shelves aside, sets up a long table and serves family-style dinner for private groups of up to 10 people for $1,000.

“I’m not going back,” Mr. Pegg says. “The pandemic forced us to create a new business model and I really like this format.”

More important, everyone’s happier.

“The cooks don’t feel like cogs. I get to cook everyday. We take vacations. The customers are thrilled. If we have to close the restaurant again, we can stay afloat. And we’re making the same numbers with less volume.”

You don’t have a ‘right’ to endanger others (letter to the editor)

It is well established in American law that “your freedom to swing your fist ends at another person’s nose.”

www.silive.com

Freedom is not the issue here. It is well established in American law that “your freedom to swing your fist ends at another person’s nose.” Similarly, the “freedom” to spread a potentially deadly virus ends when you are endangering others. Object to mandates? Quit. Think your “freedom” is being infringed upon? Stay out of public places. You don’t have a “right” to endanger those around you, either by driving 100 mph through a school zone or spreading a potentially deadly virus.

Of course when you bring up the virus being deadly, the next response you get back is a denial that it’s deadly. Thus the primary issue here is not a lack of facts but psychological stress causing people to intentionally deny the facts and reality before them, detaching any sense of responsibility for their actions because in their mind, “they’re doing the right thing and trying to save lives.”

4 Ways Trusting Your Intuition Is A Superpower

Have you ever had a difficult decision to make, and you didn’t know what to do? You create a pros and cons list to no avail. Any choice you make comes with consequences and questions. But you know you have to make one. In those moments, you know you have to ask yourself what you really want.

www.forbes.com

There are a few things that get in the way of intuition. They are overthinking, ‘shoulds,’ bias, approval seeking, when you really want something, and even trauma. To get through those obstacles, become self-aware, scan your body, and examine your beliefs. Getting out of your own head can actually lead to more intuitive thinking. The benefits are that you find yourself, you make the right choice, you take chances, and you take action where others will not.

Intuition can come from pattern-matching, seeing correlation in patterns from experience to present moment. The brain processes patterns of information through explicit and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is when you are consciously aware of what you know. Tacit knowledge is unconscious. According to Situational Awareness Matters, tacit knowledge is “knowledge that resides outside of everyday awareness.” Intuition can be deemed ‘tacit hunches.’ It pulls from that unconscious knowledge and patterns we pick up. The insights we get from intuition enter the conscious awareness of what we know or think we know.

Exploring Your Mind says brain areas involved with intuition may be the precuneus, ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the caudate nucleus, and “it’s hard to chalk all these processes up to accidents or a product of our imagination. Not only is there a neurological foundation to intuition, but it also involves your past experiences, your personality, and your subconscious, or the place that contains the essence of who you are.”

A Process for the Transfer of Energy and Feeling: George Saunders on the Key to Great Storytelling

“What a story is ‘about’ is to be found in the curiosity it creates in us, which is a form of caring.”

www.brainpickings.org

We move through a storied world as living stories. Every human life is an autogenerated tale of meaning — we string the chance-events of our lives into a sensical and coherent narrative of who and what we are, then make that narrative the psychological pillar of our identity.

To study the way we read is to study the way the mind works: the way it evaluates a statement for truth, the way it behaves in relation to another mind (i.e., the writer’s) across space and time… The part of the mind that reads a story is also the part that reads the world; it can deceive us, but it can also be trained to accuracy; it can fall into disuse and make us more susceptible to lazy, violent, materialistic forces, but it can also be urged back to life, transforming us into more active, curious, alert readers of reality.

That last sentence above is quite poignant for the paradoxical times we are living within. So much change is occurring that it’s causing people discomfort, thus they want to deny the reality before them, like someone grieving the loss of someone but in this case it’s their own way of life that is being lost.

Yet at the same time, this epic challenge is causing some people to re-examine their lives, what they believe, and the way they do things. In effect, they are re-examining their identity. And in doing so, they are questioning and questing towards a newer narrative that will redefine their life and identity as a whole. This is more commonly known as post-traumatic growth.

COVID-19 driving ‘transformative’ changes to workplace culture, says expert

Organizations that prioritize worker safety and mental health will lead the charge

www.northernontariobusiness.com

Shaw believes that, as health and safety policies evolve, “the workplace of the future is going to be a very different place” from those we recognize today.

She envisions postsecondary and graduate programs that guide future leaders away from graphs and charts and numbers and toward organizational culture, which she believes will be essential to a company’s longevity.

Workplaces in which employees feel safe and comfortable will be able to attract highly skilled talent, while those that fail to change with the times will be left behind.

“We’ve got a generation coming into our workplaces who simply aren’t going to put up with any garbage, and they can tell if you’re being genuine or not,” Shaw said.

“It’s a time when leaders are going to have to be putting organizational culture first, so they’re going to be using cultures of organizations in order to attract people, because that’s where people are going to want to go.”

The Future of Education is Not Math and Science, But Curiosity and Compassion – The Debrief

Perttu Polonen makes a case for an approach to child education that will be critical to preparing them for a marketplace defined by change.

thedebrief.org

In September of 2021, Polonen sat down with The Debrief to share his thoughts on the type of individuals most likely to succeed in the coming decades and the “soft skills” these future workers will have to master to survive an ever-changing marketplace.

There are no secure degrees or jobs anymore. We have to face that fact. We cannot guarantee anybody a lifelong career anymore, that this one type of skill set is what will help you for the next forty years.

I think we now need to learn to live with uncertainty. Find peace in uncertainty. I think that’s [going to be] a challenge for many, but we need to learn to live a happy, peaceful life in times of uncertainty.

I think we need to update our skill set as we update our phones. That has to be the mindset for the future.

We’re talking about compassion and creativity, curiosity and empathy. People think it’s like secondary, but I think these will be the most important skills.

I really believe that after the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the Information Revolution, which is where we are now, the next one would be the Human Revolution.

In the first page of my book, I kind of explained that brief history that we have gone from the muscles to head, from head to heart. So the resource that you needed at work was muscle, like early days, because it was physical work. Then machines outperformed our muscles, so the education system went to, you know, industrial society. And we’re still there. You get a job if you can show it with your head. I believe the next step is from the head to the heart.

Interviewer: So are you saying that in the future, the top skill you can have is to be a good human?

Yes, precisely! I think it all starts with compassion. You know, develop your compassion, and everything will follow.

What I find remarkable about these insights is that they directly correlate with what I’ve been researching and learning about Creativity, Social Innovation, and The Future of Work for the past two decades and more importantly how they integrate and are encompassed within Vertical Development (aka Leadership Development).

That’s because vertical development is effectively learning about how to “level up” psychologically and expanding your mindset and worldview in the process, thus transforming the way you perceive your self, other people, and the world as a whole.

What’s even more remarkable though is that if you look at the stages of psychological development below which in turn allow us to “level up” our consciousness, you can directly see a correlation with the above article and how they are focusing on the very same “values”, especially those beyond the conventional stages of psychological growth (i.e. 5. Creativity, 6. Empathy, 7. Compassion), often referred to as post-conventional, as shown below.

This is why I find vertical development so fascinating because it effectively provides the touchstones that can help us in finding our way (aka wayfinding) towards a future of greater possibilities and potential for all. So it’s not providing us with a clear and concise road map but rather waymarkers that helps us know when we have reached the psychological “territory” we are striving for.

And most important of all though, it’s realizing that the future is not just about leaders “levelling up” but followers as well. Why? Because in a future where leaders (levels 6 & 7) let go of control, giving more space for collaboration and contribution from the collective leadership of the group, it requires followers (levels 4 & 5) who authentically know what intrinsically motivates them, thus taking responsible accountability for their work without being told what to do.

During WWII, getting the flu vaccine was patriotic. Some no longer view science that way.

Scientific breakthroughs such as the influenza vaccine, which helped the U.S. win World War II, were hailed as miracles that would help define a new generation of discovery.

www.inquirer.com

Decades later, at age 98, Costantini would recall in crisp detail how he waited, alongside other young soldiers, to receive a handful of vaccinations that the Army required. “The government was worried about their soldiers,” he said.

It didn’t occur to Costantini to question the necessity of the vaccines, or to refuse them in the name of personal freedom. “We didn’t give a crap. OK? It was that simple. You got in line, took your shot, and that’s it. It was no big deal.”

Great article that perfectly fits in with my previous post about how we need to change the narrative around getting the vaccine and show how it promotes freedom and responsibility to your nation and to the society you belong to at large. Again it would great if someone created vintage war-like propaganda posters that showed how “citizens can contribute to this greater effort to restore our freedoms” (i.e. Be a Liberator! Getting vaccinated today and help restore our society’s freedoms!).

People refusing to get COVID-19 vaccine may be doing so as a result of a deep existential anxiety, a psychology professor says.

Dr. Joseph Hayes of Acadia University says vaccine skeptics such as the ones who organized demonstrations near Canada’s hospitals earlier this month are looking for a sense of meaning.

“The way people manage this deeper existential anxiety is by investing in a world of meaning and try to live up to standards of value that would give us a sense of personal significance or personal value,” he told CBC during an interview aired Monday on Island Morning.

“We want to believe that life is meaningful and worthy of meaning, essentially. So where you see some hesitancy or even some resistance to getting the vaccine, I think what you’re seeing is people affirming the value of freedom. That the value of freedom is so important that we need to defend this. That life would be not worth living without it.“

This directly correlates with what I said before about the primary reason people don’t want to get vaccinated is more about their identity than anything else and it relates to a feeling of a loss of control in their lives. More specifically, a loss of control that first occurred with the pandemic itself and then was further compounded by the government and officials imposing lockdowns that took away the very things that gave these people a strong sense of identity on a basic psychological level (i.e. belonging to a group, socializing, etc).

In effect, if you prevent people from doing the very things that give them a sense of identity, it can literally feel like you’re trying to kill them. This is no different than a person losing their job or even their entire way of life as a career path and it feeling like their entire sense of identity and life is being ripped away from this, thus causing them to implode by suicide or explode by killing others.

The sad thing about this though is that these people experiencing this identity trauma obviously aren’t realizing that pretty much everyone is experiencing this same feeling. It’s just that other people are better able to cope with it, possibly due to their greater psychological capacity for dealing with change.

Hayes says that while it would be difficult to convince an anti-vaxxer to change his or her mind, one way to do it that could prove to be effective would be to highlight “the personal value or heroic nature” of getting vaccinated.

“This could be looked at [as] some historic moment in time,” he said. “We want to feel something that is larger than ourselves, that transcends our personal lives. You could get that by taking part in protest movements that affirm the value of freedom. But you could also get that by feeling you’re part of ridding the world of COVID.“

This is a remarkably brilliant idea to shift the narrative for anti-vaxxers by agreeing with them that freedom is of the utmost importance for us all which is why we do need to get vaccinated, so that we can return to the freedoms we had before.

It’s funny because I find that people with conventional mindsets love continually to tell stories about their parents or grandparents and how they sacrificed so much in the previous wars throughout history. It’s almost like they would have loved to have lived during those times and participated in that “great effort” to rid the world of the “evil tyrants” of that time who were trying to take away their freedoms.

The reality is that they can actually participate in a similar great effort within the context of world today, as the pandemic can be seen as this “enemy” that is trying to take our freedoms away from us. Seriously, I’m surprised that someone hasn’t already started creating propaganda-like posters similar to those during the war effect of World War II, showing how everyday citizens can contribute to the “greater effort” of stopping it so as to “return our freedoms”.

It’s funny. I remember one news article when vaccine mandates were first implemented. An anti-vaxxer lady within a White Spot restaurant shouted “Is this communist China?” when asked to show her vaccine card. I thought it was ironically hilarious for her to say that when she was effectively shouting to a bunch of people who were enjoying some semblance of their previous freedoms by being vaccinated.

As for those hesitant to get vaccinated because they believe the risks of the vaccine outweigh those of the virus, Hayes says they might be refusing to get the shot in order to avoid personal responsibility.

“If you’re really concerned about side effects, it can feel a little daunting that you would be responsible, essentially, for your own fate or hardship,” he said. “Whereas just sort of passively laying low and waiting for the whole thing to pass, you can feel less responsible… for anything that may happen.“

This is also a radical insight as well. As I’ve already stated before, many vaccinated people see most anti-vaxxers as completely irresponsible people because it seems like they don’t care about the lives of other people. This insight shows how anti-vaxxers are actually trying to be responsible in a twisted sort of way because they don’t want a wrong choice (i.e. getting the vaccine) coming back to haunt them and ruining their life (i.e. vaccine side effects), thus making it impossible for them to continue fulfilling their responsibilities to others.

The problem as stated before though is that they don’t seem to have the psychologically capacity to handle this Catch-22 situation that the pandemic is causing because not getting the vaccine could kill them and prevent them of fulfilling their responsibilities as well. This is effectively the cognitive dissonance they’re experiencing that I mentioned before. To get around it, they make believe that the coronavirus isn’t as deadly as it seems, thus disbelieving the reality of it which resolves the conflict within their mind and allows them to continue justifying their freedoms to connect and socialize with others.

I’ve mentioned before that I’d like to take psychological development and make it more accessible and understandable to people by making a Player’s Handbook for The Game of Life that metaphorically describes psychological development similar to an MMORPG, whereby you “level up” consciously by going through different “expansions” or stages of development and overcoming your “monstrous” fears that are standing in your way (which in turn embody the psychological metaphors within Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey).

The primary benefit of this approach is that it helps you to create an externalized visual map of your subjective life adventures so far that they enable you to objectively begin to psychologically manage your “self” going forward, something which Robert Kegan indicated was essential for the growth and development of a person, describing it as a Subject-Object Shift.

While I’ve always wondered what it would be like collaborating with an actual game developer on something like this, it seems like I don’t have to imagine much more so now since Will Wright is effectively creating something very close to this concept with his next game called Proxi.

I actually now want to get into the players mind. I want the players mind to become the landscape of the game in some sense.

Can we find a game format in which we can acquire these memories from your life. They’re really important memories, not you know we had Starbucks yesterday, but the things you remember from 10 years old, 12 years old, 15 years old.

Interviewer: The touchstones of your life, the things that define you.

Ya exactly. Can we now analyze, put them into a deep AI, start doing associations between the different aspects that they share and start building a model if your mind. You know not just your conscious mind but as well as your subconscious mind. You know how do you deeply feel and think and behave with the world around you based upon your life experience.

BTW I also find it fascinating about how later in this conversation he describes using AI to help a person understand themselves. This is something I’ve touched on before, with regards to how social media companies like Facebook are using AI on the data they have on you but effectively using it against you, as they can see your psychologically weaknesses and thus use them to their advantage.

This is why I think companies like Facebook are completely clueless as to the goldmine they are sitting on because if they used this data and AI to help their customers in a similar way, say charging them a minimal monthly fee to do so, they could pivot and become social leaders in helping the growth and development of people, rather than using psychology to take advantage of them.

So you know I think that’s about half of Proxi is riding, surfing this wave of AI that’s happening right now in a way to where it’ll help you understand yourself in a way that you never thought possible before.

And then how do we bring that to a way that you value very highly as opposed to just targeting advertising to you.