defenses against acting. Changing the focus from questions about practicality to questions about personal commitment entails more than simply a shift in agenda or a change in conversation. When we embrace the Yes questions, we are confronted with our freedom. Most of the messages of our culture deny our freedom and tell us that we are products of our environment, driven by rewards and self-interest, and that those in power hold our future in their hands. To truly act on our own values and pursue what matters means that we need to accept, at the level of bone marrow, that we are free and therefore responsible for the actions we choose, regardless of our environment and its messages.
The most difficult aspect of acting on what matters is to come face to face with our own humanity—our caution, our capacity to rationalize our willingness to fit into the culture rather than live on its margin. This is true in our neighborhood, among colleagues, and in the workplace. Fundamentally, to act fully on what matters means we are asked to claim our freedom and live with the consequences. The subtlety with which we deny our freedom warrants a lifetime of exploration, but what follows are some examples that are germane to this discussion.
The Boss Is Cause
The first line of defense against freedom is to pay attention to people in power. Many of the How? questions carry the statement that the future is in someone else’s hands: the politicians, the media, management, the unions, the government. When we seek their support and hold them responsible for our institutions, we reinforce our own helplessness. We do this when we credit them with our success and blame them for failure. The persistent “How do we get top management support?” is the embodiment of the belief that someone else is vital to change, and this is a very popular question.
42When you or I suggest that leadership is not that crucial, few people like the message. Most claim that we have not met their top management, that we are naïve about the power of the position—the discussion is endless. Some will actually get angry if you persist with the argument that we give the power to and, in this way, create those at the top. Nelson Mandela, the recipient of worldwide admiration, has stated that the moment you treat a man as if he is a god, you have invited the devil into existence.
The devil, in this instance, is not the behavior of the boss or politician; the devil is the denial of our own power and the expectation that someone else will lead us to a better tomorrow.
The belief that the power lies “up there” is a way of ensuring our own helplessness, all for the relief of an imagined moment of safety.
The Will to Analyze and Seek Concrete Data
We also deny ourselves action when we keep looking for more and more information to ensure greater certainty about the future as a condition of moving on. We can turn curiosity into a life stance, in which life is to be studied, measured, submitted to a continual cost-benefit analysis, rather than lived. We can make a career of evaluating the adventures of others. The will to evaluate and measure is in the same category as the will to hold power. The illusion is that if we can conduct enough research on changes in human systems, the results will be persuasive. My experience is that data and measures are not half as persuasive as anecdotes. Anecdotes, personal stories, reminiscences like biblical parables, are the medium through which faith is restored. Stories are a form of poetry, and give us a saving image to personally relate to. The persistent questions about data and evidence are most often a form of disagreement, or despair, or show a lack of faith. There is little discussion of faith in organizations, but it is only with faith that significant changes can begin.
43When Is a Cigar Just a Cigar?
When is a How? question useful and not a defense against change? Of course, questions can be a genuine search for more information. They become suspect when no answer will satisfy. I become wary when people ask how, get an answer, and ask how again and again and again. Stand in the presence of any member of the How? family: What are the steps to changing culture? How do you handle difficult people? Where is this working? When the answer is offered and each time the question snaps back like a rubber band, you know that doubt or caution is the real subject of discussion, not methodology or data.
When no answer satisfies, and people continue to act as if they do not understand, then the wrong question is being asked.
Then, the question about How? is not for information, but is a defense against an alternative and unpredictable future.
Authentic questions, on the other hand, are asked with the expectation that those doing the questioning will join in devising an answer. The question is not used to make a statement, or to minimize choice. A question about method has value when we are willing to act on its answer. When a question is followed by a series of additional questions, then beware. Be especially careful of the questions about measurement. We all want evidence, but each of us must consider this: When the measurement question is asked as if someone else, working independently, must prove value, then the question is a refusal in disguise. It is fine to refuse, but say it directly, don’t disguise it as a search for data.
44The Risks Are Real
I want to acknowledge that to confront people with their freedom— in this case, to face them with intimate and paradoxical questions and postpone getting into the familiar territory of the pragmatic—is to invite their anger. Many will resent the demand to bring their personal ideals or longings into the discussion. We hear charges that the Yes questions are too personal, as if business were not a personal thing. There is a cultural contempt, especially in the media, for anything that smacks of “touchy feely,” touching and feeling.
This means that the answer—that you are a free soul, responsible for the future of your institution and your environment—is quite indigestible. That is the problem with this book. Anyone who acts on its message risks being accused of being too abstract, or too philosophical, or naïve and unproven in the “real world,” or a fan of New Age spirituality. Someone will note that there are few examples where these ideas have worked, where they can be credited with a major turnaround. The most cynical response to idealism and the pursuit of meaning is the claim that most people do not care about meaning. What they want is a better lifestyle. They want higher pay, better benefits, not more responsibility. They want better bosses, not more freedom.
These objections have some validity, but what they likely mean is that the people making them are saying no to the ideas of freedom, choice, and accountability. I would support them in their refusal. The only response to these concerns is to acknowledge them and encourage those voicing them to just say no. Part of freedom is the right to deny the existence of freedom.
45We Make It So
We all, in some way, defend against acting on our values and intentions by denying that we are, in fact, helping to create the culture that pressures us towards safety and a methodological existence. We complain about the culture as if we were only visitors here. We want to hold top management responsible for creating organizational culture, and we each have our favorite culprits to blame for taking the society in a direction that distresses us. As individuals we keep our heads down, believe that there will be time later to act on our intentions, and choose to dismiss the more difficult, ambiguous, and personal questions that deal with the meaning of our work and our experience.
The problem is that when we invest emotionally and economically in—in fact, organize ourselves around—safety, control, and predictability, we postpone the deeper questions of what matters. The cost to ourselves and our institutions is the quality of being alive. In every concert Bruce Springsteen cries out, “Is anybody alive out there?” Interesting question. The pursuit of what matters is about bringing the quality of being alive to everything we do. This is, ultimately, the reward for pursuing our desires.
Escape from Freedom
Part of the appeal of making How? the question of choice is that it lifts the requirement of going deeper and reflecting on our ideals. We say we do not have time for this, but there are deeper reasons to postpone depth, for it can make us anxious. Pursuing How? is the safer path, the more comfortable path. Asking How? thereby is a way to avoid anxiety or, as philosopher Eric Fromm would say, to “escape from freedom.”
46What we really want is both freedom and safety, but they are strange bedfellows. Freedom gets confused with liberty (which means we are not oppressed). Freedom is not doing your own thing, but just the opposite. It means we are the authors of our own experience. It means we are accountable for the well being of all that is around us. It means we believe that we are constituting, or creating, the world in which we live. This belief is rare for most of us, because mostly we feel helpless. At these moments, we wish for better leaders, better government, and someone else to create the conditions for us to be free. As if someone else can give us our freedom.
The dilemma is that we do not want to pay for our freedom. We want to drive fear out of the workplace. We want someone else to assure us of a safer tomorrow. We want to know how: how to do it, how much it costs, how long it will take, how to get those people to align with us, how to measure it, and who else is doing it. All of this is a wish to go to heaven and not have to die. We want certainty before we act. And we want those in power to bless us. We have been willing to yield sovereignty to our bosses or institutions in return for their promise to take care of us. This bargain is disappearing through no action of our own, but the disappearance of safety is hard to live with.
As long as we wish for safety, we will have difficulty pursuing what matters.
Loss of Faith
Asking How? is also a defense against our own loss of faith. It is a defense that the culture strongly rewards. The culture promises security through answers and the bottom line. The question is whether it is a real or illusory promise. Knowing how to do something may give us confidence, but it does not give us our freedom. Freedom comes from commitment, not accomplishment. It comes from finding our own voice, not following another’s. Continually asking how is a form of self-restraint and even subjugation. I am acting at that moment as if I am not quite ready; I need one more lesson to be able to cook, sing, manage, raise a child, hit a tennis ball, motivate others, live to be one hundred and one.
47In this way, How? becomes an expression of our lack of trust in ourselves. Instead of choosing the life we want, we postpone it. We believe that we are not enough, that we don’t have it together. We think that we must attend one more workshop, read one more book, get a college degree if we don’t have one, an advanced degree if we do. We think we must have a recipe if we are hungry, a personal trainer if we are out of shape (who isn’t?), plastic surgery if we are looking older, and we go shopping when all else fails.
Shopping is a culturally approved way to assuage our anxiety and postpone going deeper within to the core of our experience. If performing and accomplishing my way out of anxiety fails, maybe I can purchase relief. I was in a high-end lingerie shop in New York once and I asked the salesperson, “Who buys this expensive underwear?” She said that men buy it when they feel guilty and women buy it when they feel depressed—in a consumer culture, we believe that we can spend and shop our way out of anxiety and pain. I forget, now, what I was doing in that store.
The Mask of Confusion
There are times when leaders ask us to make a change and we respond by acting confused. We continue to ask How? when we do not really mean it; the confusion is just a measure of our discontent. We act like we are confused, like we don’t understand. The reality is that we do understand—we get it, but we don’t like it. At work, when management says we have to shift culture, structure, strategy, we may think they are wrong. Since we think we cannot say that directly, we instead ask them to provide more detail, define roles, give us the tools, the blueprint for what they have in mind. If they respond to our requests, it rarely makes a significant difference. The effect of the effort to eliminate “confusion” is simply to delay the change.
48This Is It
Our wish for quick action and our love of tools, useful as they can be, distract us from our own values and the reality of our own experience.
Endlessly seeking more tools, more skills, more methodology deflects us from accepting our humanity, our limitations, the fact that the questions that trouble us are inherent in being human and have no real answers.
We are as together as we are ever going to be and it may not be enough. My body is not in the shape I want it to be; I am getting older and a flat stomach won’t change that; the quality of my meal will not satisfy the hunger in my heart; no amount of shopping will cure my loneliness.
To live our lives fully, to work wholeheartedly, to refuse directly what we cannot swallow, to accept the mystery in all matters of meaning—this is the ultimate adventure. The pursuit of certainty and predictability is our caution speaking. Freedom is the prize, safety is the price, what is required is faith more than fact and will more than skill.
49The Price of Not Acting on What Matters
This chapter has been about our resistances to acting on what matters. Let me summarize here what has been suggested above:
- First, our resistance isolates us from a deeper intimacy with ourselves, which is the wish to understand, to wonder why, to find our purpose, to let other people in, to express our feelings, and to affirm our humanity.
- Second, it robs from us one aspect of our freedom: the capacity to pursue what matters to us, to create a world that we believe in according to our values, independent of the marketplace or what is fashionable at the moment.
- Third, the decision to ask the How? questions first and postpone the questions of meaning, the Yes questions, has a pervasive effect on how we experience our work as well as the optimism we feel about the organizations we inhabit. It influences the way we think about our lives and the larger society, especially the production/consumption engine that drives it. The love of what is practical and concrete reinforces a culture of materialism. Most of us see clearly the economic materialism out there, but this is simply an expression of the spiritual materialism within us.
The challenge is not that we do not know what matters to us; it is that sustaining our actions becomes unbearably burdensome. At those moments when we have the space to consider what is in our hearts and what dreams remain for us to fulfill, the task can seem monumental and treacherous. Often we become clearer about what matters to us when we are in a protected learning or spiritual environment: a retreat, a sanctuary, a vacation conversation, a workshop, or a coaching experience. In a moment of clear thinking and feeling about what matters to us, we may be determined to act on our insight. But as we return to the mainstream of daily life, the determination can become diluted. What happens is that when we reenter the culture with all of its power, we face once again the commitments we have made, and the expectations of those around us. The pull of getting things done and the questions of How? exert their force. These are the moments when what matters and what works seem most at odds with each other. What follows are ideas that help sustain our intentions in the face of it all.