The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

  • Practice of Peace audio book

    Somebody asked on the Open Space mailing list if Harrison Owens book The Practice of Peace would appear as an audio book. Harrison replied that there were no current plans, so I suggested creating an audio book together.

    I was inspired by Cory Doctorows latest books (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Eastern Standard Tribe) as well as Lawrence Lessigs new book Free Culture, which have been released under the Creative Commons’ least restrictive license. This license allows people to do pretty much whatever they want with the original works, as long as it’s non-commercial. This allowed some people to self-organize and create audio versions of the books, by each volunteering to read a chapter. This is what we’re going to do with the Practice of Peace also, and I volunteered to coordinate.

    Here’s a list of chapters:
    Chapter I Peace and the Practice of Peace
    Chapter II A Piecemeal Approach to Peace
    Chapter III Scope of Work for the Peacemaker
    Chapter IV Muddling Through
    Chapter V The Pathology of Control and the Power of Griefwork
    Chapter VI The Practice of Peace
    Chapter VII Many Roads to Peace
    Chapter VIII Preparation for Peacemaking

    If you’d like to read a chapter, please add a comment to this post saying what chapter you’d like to read. If somebody’s already taken your favourite chapter you might consider another one. If all the chapters are taken add a comment anyway – maybe will work something out.

    Harrisons publisher, Human Systems Dynamics Institute, will send each person a copy of the book, and we can then record a chapter and put them together somehow.

    There’s been a huge interest in participating, which is a wonderful reflection on the generosity of the OS community. So what do we do if we have more volunteers than chapters (which I’m almost sure that we have). Any suggestions?

  • Consciousness – an illusion?

    In an article entitled The Grand Illusion: Why consciousness only exists when you look for it, Dr. Susan Blackmore looks at different models of consciousness.

    It seems that most of our current thinking on consciousness is being contradicted by modern brain research, and that a new model is needed.

    If you are not yet feeling perplexed (in which case I am not doing my job properly), consider another problem. It seems that most of what goes on in the brain is not conscious. For example, we can consciously hear a song on the car radio, while we are not necessarily conscious of all the things we do as we’re driving. This leads us to make a fundamental distinction: contrasting conscious brain processes with unconscious ones. But no one can explain what the difference really is. Is there a special place in the brain where unconscious things are made conscious? Are some brain cells endowed with an extra magic something that makes what goes on in them subjective? This doesn’t make sense. Yet most theories of consciousness assume that there must be such a difference, and then get stuck trying to explain or investigate it.

    She also mentions some studies done with change blindness. Take a look at this picture, and see if you can spot what changes every time it flashes.

    Here’s my favourite quote from the article:

    It sounds bizarre, but try to catch yourself not being conscious. More than a hundred years ago the psychologist William James likened introspective analysis to “trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.” The modern equivalent is looking in the fridge to see whether the light is always on. However quickly you open the door, you can never catch it out. The same is true of consciousness. Whenever you ask yourself, “Am I conscious now?” you always are.But perhaps there is only something there when you ask. Maybe each time you probe, a retrospective story is concocted about what was in the stream of consciousness a moment before, together with a “self” who was apparently experiencing it. Of course there was neither a conscious self nor a stream, but it now seems as though there was.

    Perhaps a new story is concocted whenever you bother to look. When we ask ourselves about it, it would seem as though there”s a stream of consciousness going on. When we don’t bother to ask, or to look, it doesn’t, but then we don’t notice so it doesn’t matter.

    The fact that you can’t unconsciously examine consciousness made me think of this grook by Piet Hein:

    Mirrors have one limitation: You can’t
    either by hook or by crook
    use them to how you look when you aren’t
    looking to see how you look.

  • Quote

    ,

    When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college – that my job was to teach people how to draw.

    She stared back at me, increduolous, and said, “You mean they forget?”

    – Howard Ikemoto, quoted in Art And Fear

  • Quote

    , ,

    Christian Theism is the belief that God is a personal, transcendent Creator of the universe–and of us. This world view showed up on a T-shirt I saw recently:

    There are two things in life you can be sure of.
    1. There is a God.
    2. You are not Him.

    – From this article: Answering the Big Questions of Life by Sue Bohlin

  • Psycopathic corporations

    ,

    The Corporation is a Canadian documentary released last year, which has an interesting premise: Under current law, a corporation is a person. But what kind of person?

    Considering the odd legal fiction that deems a corporation a ?person? in the eyes of the law, the feature documentary employs a checklist, based on actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and DSM IV, the standard tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. What emerges is a disturbing diagnosis.

    Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation?s operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.

    I like the premise, and as Noam Chomsky says in the movie, you must distinguish between the system and the individual. It is perfectly likely, that most individuals in a corporation can be nice, thoughtful, compassionate people, yet the resulting system shows behaviour that is selfish, greedy and short-sighted.

    While this behaviour is certainly prevalent in some corporations, I think that more and more organizations are starting to realize, that this way of doing business is not sustainable, and are making positive changes.

    I had the pleasure yesterday of visiting the offices of IKEA in Denmark, to interview them for my book on happiness at work. About 8 months ago, they gave their entire check-out staff a 20% pay raise. They did this partly in recognition of the fact that these people have one of the hardest jobs in IKEA while getting the least amount of money, and partly because they think it will make them money in the long run. This is very far from psycopathic behaviour. It shows a creativity and maturity, based on the realization that there is no inherent oppostion between making money and doing good.

    Sample clip here.

  • A small surprise

    My girlfriend prepared a small surprise for me today. She’d made a cup of tea and bought a couple of pastries, but when I took a bite of mine, there was a ring in it.

    For a moment I thought “whoah, is she proposing or what?” I don’t mind telling you, that for a few seconds there, I was spooked.

    Then I remembered that today is… April 1st. Score one for Patricia.

  • Quote

    , ,

    Do, or do not. There is no try.

    – Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back

  • Book review: Tao Te Ching

    ,

    I’m not really sure that it makes sense to review this book. I’ve read it and enjoyed it, but there is absolutely no way I can convey what it’s about or why you should read this book. It is wise, poetic, enigmatic and enlightening. It is also vague, frustrating, weird and confusing.

    Tao means the way. Te means power. Ching means classic. The title Tao Te Ching is usually translated as The Classic Book About The Way And The Power Of The Way. But as the very first chapter says:
    The way you can go
    isn’t the real way
    The Name you can name
    isn’t the real name

    In our western culture ideas should be communicated clearly and efficiently. And here’s a book that teems with paradox and poetry. A book where the central theme is not-doing; a concept that is certainly not practiced often in our up-and-at-them culture.

    Little is known about the Tao Te Ching, except that it’s around 2500 years old, chinese and was probably written by Lao Tzu who may have been a contemporary of Confucius. The translation I’ve read is by Ursula K Le Guin, who knows no chinese, but who has brought her life-long appreciation of the work and her background as a succesful author into the translation. She acknowledges, that her version is anything but a literal translation. Since the original work is poetic, a literal translation may capture the words but not the power of the original work. A poetic translation such as the one she’s attempted, will not match word-for-word but may come closer to the spirit of the original. I think she has done a fine job, and whenever I’ve been able to compare her version to others, hers is more to my taste.

    Tao Te Ching has been translated lots of times, and many of the translations are available on the net.

  • Quote

    ,

    We live in a world where attraction is ubiquitous. Organization wants to happen. People want their lives to mean something. We seek one another to develop new capacities. With all these wonderful and innate desires calling us to organize, we can stop worrying about designing perfect structure or rules. We need to become intrigued by how we create a clear and coherent identity, a self that we can organize around.

    – Margaret Wheatley in A Simpler Way

  • The law of two feet

    Inspired by a question on the OSlist (the Open Space mailing list), I wrote the following observations on the law of two feet. The law of two feet states, that in Open Space meetings, any time you feel that you’re not learning and not contributing, you can use your two feet to go somewhere else.

    This of course stands in startk contrast to many other kinds of gatherings, where it is considered impolite, counter-productive or rude to leave in the middle of a session.

    The question was:
    The Law of Two Feet gives you the chance to “step out” of those situations, which seem to be awkward and problematic but if you are brave enough and stay there, maybe you can solve your problems. Isn’t it dangerous to step out of each situation which we find at first sight uncomfortable or boring. Maybe it is just the temptation to escape and avoid something.

    I’ve struggled with exactly this dilemma. If people leave at the first sign of trouble, will they grow and learn? The funny thing is, that stating the law of two feet does NOT induce people to just up and go at the first hint of conflict. Paradoxically, people are probably more likely to stay, and definitely more open and constructive when they know that it is OK to leave – even if they don’t use that option. Being in a difficult situation is made infinitely worse, if you know that you can’t get out of it.

    Also, stating that people are free to leave, is no more than stating a fact. OS participants can get up and go any time they choose – I mean nobody’s tied them to their chairs. In fact this is true of any kind of meeting. There is nothing holding you in your chair, other than your own decision to not get up and leave. So acknowledging the fact that you’re free to go brings us a little closer to how things are, brings us more in tune with reality, than saying “You have to stay for the entire session”.

    This is one of those paradoxical situations, where you actually achieve the opposite of what you might think, ie. where reminding people of their freedom to leave, probably makes it more likely that they stay :o)

Connect

Get our newsletter

“I can’t believe it – a newsletter actually worth reading!”
– Subscriber

Over 6,000 people subscribe to our newsletter with tons of tips about happiness at work.

Get our books

“It’s very, very good. It’s incredibly well written, full of insights, and there are exercises to improve your own happiness at work. You can’t ask for more than that!”
– David Maister, author of Practice What You Preach

“What an inspiring book. Every leader should read it. This type of leadership has been integral to our success and I know it will boost your results too.“
– Garry Ridge, CEO WD-40 Company

Get Our Free Newsletter

Over 6,000 people already get our free newsletter with useful tips, videos, links and articles about happiness at work.
Subscribe to our newsletter here.

Top posts last week

Non-inspirational quotesOctober 22, 2003
Our 5 best tips to beat the post-holiday bluesAugust 6, 2025
Top 10 reasons why constant complaining is so toxic in the workplaceAugust 7, 2007
How to handle chronic complainersAugust 24, 2006
The movie "The Secret" is entirely fakeMarch 15, 2007

recent Posts