Category: General

We’re Losing Our Humanity, and the Pandemic Is to Blame

“What the hell is happening? I feel like we are living on another planet. I don’t recognize anyone anymore.”

www.propublica.org

Great article but I would change one thing about it. It’s title. The Pandemic isn’t to “blame” for us losing our humanity. We were already losing it well before it happened.

This concurs with so many other articles where people talk about issues within the workplace (ie lack of humanity & well-being for workers) and how they’ve existed for decades, yet only now they are being brought to the surface by the Pandemic.

So the pandemic isn’t the causes for these issues but rather it’s the catalyst that’s making us aware of them in a way that we can no longer ignore.

Many of the altercations have begun over masking because, unlike your vaccination status, a mask is right there on your face. Depending on your point of view, the mask can symbolize an erosion of personal freedoms or a willingness to protect others, a society that accepts tyranny or one that embraces science. A person’s reaction to a mask — or the absence of one — can be driven by an entire network of beliefs and emotions that have little to do with the face covering itself.

People’s pandemic views aren’t just preferences. They’ve evolved to fundamental beliefs. And when that happens, social psychologists say, people are more likely to accept incivility to achieve what they want.

“When people feel that their attitudes reflect strong moral convictions, that gives them permission to dehumanize those who oppose them,” said Linda Skitka, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who’s researching ideological divides. “And it doesn’t take a lot for the shift into perceptions of good and evil. So if the other side is basically evil, it’s not a far stretch to say it’s OK to yell at them.”

Because the mask has become so polarizing, the extreme reactions aren’t really about being asked to wear one for an hour. It’s about communicating what side you’re on.

“It really makes adaptive sense to treat out-group members not like people, because then it’s much easier to hurt them and to act against them,” he said. “One central piece of intergroup conflict is a switch in viewing your enemies from full-blown humans to dehumanized entities that you do not ascribe all the things that you typically ascribe to a person. That makes conflict so much easier.”

On a societal scale, one of the fastest ways for two deeply entrenched, opposing groups to start seeing each other as fellow humans again is to give them something bigger to fight against together. It’s an “Independence Day” sort of scenario, Chester, the Virginia Commonwealth University professor, said: If aliens invaded, countries who hate each other in normal times would suddenly work together against an external threat.

But the external threat with the potential to unite a deeply polarized country, he said, should have been the pandemic. And it didn’t happen.

“I think fundamentally, it’s because we have different perceptions of this pandemic,” he said. “It’s really hard now that it’s so entrenched, that masks are viewed as this group symbol. It’s really hard to get people out of that.”

To put this all in another way, people at different stages of (the midrange of) psychological development are effectively at “civil war” with each other, using their beliefs to determine who is an “enemy” or not, dehumanizing each other in the process.

And until we can all come around the table and see each other has human beings again, who all have the same psychological needs, not much will change. The greatest obstacle to this though is people denying our current reality and simply want to go back to the world the way it used to be.

That’s not going to happen though because the world has already changed and is continually changing. So to step forward, we need people who are courageous enough to step into a new unknown world…but one that helps regain our base psychological needs, rather than ignores them (as such of much of the workplace is doing today).

Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

Whether in situations relating to scientific consensus, economic history or current political events, denialism has its roots in what psychologists call ‘motivated reasoning.’

theconversation.com

Yet many well-educated people sincerely deny evidence-based conclusions on these matters.

But things don’t work that way when the scientific consensus presents a picture that threatens someone’s ideological worldview.

“Motivated reasoning” is what social scientists call the process of deciding what evidence to accept based on the conclusion one prefers.

Insofar as you define yourself in terms of your cultural affiliations, information that threatens your belief system – say, information about the negative effects of industrial production on the environment – can threaten your sense of identity itself. If it’s part of your ideological community’s worldview that unnatural things are unhealthful, factual information about a scientific consensus on vaccine or GM food safety feels like a personal attack.

For example, as Jost and colleagues extensively review, populations experiencing economic distress or external threat have often turned to authoritarian, hierarchicalist leaders promising security and stability.

Under the right conditions, universal human traits like in-group favoritism, existential anxiety and a desire for stability and control combine into a toxic, system-justifying identity politics.

Simply put, a lot of this has to do with your perception of reality, rather than your intelligence.

And an intuition that I have that relates to being in denial is that the faster and greater the change, the greater the chance the person will be in denial over it, often having to go through an arduous grieving process to work through that change. This is why a lot of CEOs can be seen in complete denial, almost delusional, when their world comes crashing down literally overnight.

In a more general way though, anyone who has benefited from a stable system that has generated security for them over a long period of time will probably have a greater chance of denial if that change and disruption occurs at a rapid pace.

What Does It Mean When Someone Is In Denial?

Denial is a common defense mechanism that involves denying reality to prevent anxiety. Learn more about how being in denial can affect a person.

www.verywellmind.com

Denial is a type of defense mechanism that involves ignoring the reality of a situation to avoid anxiety. Defense mechanisms are strategies that people use to cope with distressing feelings. In the case of denial, it can involve not acknowledging reality or denying the consequences of that reality.

If you are in denial, it often means that you are struggling to accept something that seems overwhelming or stressful. However, in the short term, this defense mechanism can have a useful purpose. It can allow you to have time to adjust to a sudden change in your reality. By giving yourself time, you might be able to accept, adapt, and eventually move on.

But denial can also cause problems in your life, particularly if it keeps you from addressing a problem or making a needed change. In some cases, it can prevent you from accepting help or getting the treatment that they need.

Like other defense mechanisms, denial functions as a way to protect you from experiencing anxiety. In some cases, it might be a way to avoid dealing with stress or painful emotions. By refusing to deal with or even admit that there is something wrong, you are trying to prevent facing stress, conflict, threats, fears, and anxieties.

Denial serves a few different purposes. First, using this defense mechanism means you don’t have to acknowledge the problem. Second, it also allows you to minimize the potential consequences that might result.

Denying a problem exists allows the individual to continue engaging in destructive behavior without addressing the problem.

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.