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Evolution of life on our planet is fascinating: how life evolved from unicellular life to the extremely complex life forms and intertwined ecosystems we now know. Among the many feats of evolution, it has made us who we are, humans. Our cognitive capacities are unsurpassed on this planet, and the speed of our technological advancement has been more than impressive over the last few decades. We have managed to explore space, to cure many diseases and eradicate others, and we can communicate with anyone in the world instantly.
The flip side is that we have the ability to permanently modify our environment, and with this great power comes great responsibility. Although humans are capable of incredible technological prowess, our collective intelligence is still very short-sighted, and focused on individual short-term profit rather than on sustaining life on our planet for the future generations. This might be due to the fact that our technological capacities evolved much faster than our brains have. Although we can build machines that can analyze huge amounts of data and send people to the moon, our brains are not that different from those of our caveman ancestors.
We face an unprecedented environmental sustainability crisis. On the one hand, the risks of reaching a point of no-return on many aspects are becoming very concrete, and on the other hand, the awareness of the issues is rising due to the effects of our poor choices becoming visible, and thanks to social media that can help messages become viral.
The level of engagement and job satisfaction of the workforce is declining, and young people aspire less and less to work for corporations, which remain the main drivers of economy and social change. Corporations increasingly have to address that challenge, and reconcile their economic imperatives with the search for meaning of young generations.
Digital technology has a deep impact on our brains and our minds. One of the most precious assets companies are competing for is our attention, leading to a decline of our attention skills. On the other hand, unprecedented ease of communication across the world enables change to occur faster, which gives hope if it happens in the right direction.
Let’s explore a few facts on each of those 3 trends:
Our planet has lived through 5 major extinction episodes, during which the vast majority of life has been wiped out, which gave the opportunity to the surviving species to thrive. Scientists agree that we are in the middle of the 6th major extinction called the Holocene extinction or anthropogenic extinction, which emphasizes our responsibility in that process.
The bitter reality is that our species is faced with a massive survival challenge, and our choices in the coming decades are going to determine whether our planet will remain inhabitable, or if we will go through a major survival crisis leading to the death of a good part of our species and the destruction of most natural ecosystems. Environment speeches are often focused on global warming, but this is only one aspect of the problem. Just to cite a few examples, oceans pollution and acidification, plummeting of pollinating insects’ populations, air toxicity in big cities, and an unprecedented rate of species extinction (1000 times faster than before humans).
We have been too successful thanks to our technological progress, but our planet cannot cope with that success anymore. Between 1970 and 2019, the earth overshoot day moved from December 29th to July 29th (https://www.overshootday.org/). This means that in 1970, by the end of the year we had used all the resources that our planet can generate in 1 year. In other words, we consumed what the planet was capable of producing. In 2019, we used all the resources our planet is capable of producing by end of July, which means that we live 5 months of credit. Another way to look at the data is that in 1970, 1 planet is enough to fulfil our needs in a sustainable way. In 2019, we would need 1,75 earths to sustain our consumption.
Although we are perfectly aware of these dangers that threaten the subtle balance of life on our planet, and although we have solutions to address those at our disposal, we have collectively taken very little action in the last decades. The choices we make from now on will be key to ensure a future for the next generation.
Solutions to the environmental crisis exist, but require us to disrupt our economic model and sometimes our way of living, for example by reducing of our meat consumption, developing organic farming, alternatives to plastic packaging, or renewable energies.
Although we witness an increasing awareness on these topics, in particular among the young generation, the implementation of these solutions is slowed down by the short-sightedness of our political leaders and the pressure that companies are faced with to deliver short-term results for shareholders, even when they would like to pursue higher goals. In other words, we lack collective intelligence as a species to take planet-wide action. The separation of our planet into independently-managed countries is not working anymore to address the challenges we are facing. Corporations, on the other hand, are breaking those national barriers, and therefore have the potential to bring the needed change at a global level. Sustainability policies are not anymore mere marketing arguments to include in annual reports. They become a must-have in order to engage employees, customers and partners.
The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has published a study in 2017 showing a clear correlation between Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) measures and valuation in several industries (consumer goods, biopharmaceuticals, oil and gas, banking) (https://www.bcg.com/publications/2017/corporate-development-finance-strategy-insights-total-societal-impact-five-industries.aspx). The study describes how measures such ensuring a responsible environmental footprint, minimizing impact of products and packaging, socially and environmentally responsible sourcing, or combatting corruption have a positive impact on Margins and EBITDA.
The economic case for companies to engage into sustainability efforts is already quite clear in the short run. With the raising awareness of young customers and employees around sustainability topics, this trend is likely to amplify in the future, and it will become a clear imperative for companies to thrive. 60% of generation Z (born after 1995) want to change the world, vs. only 39% for millennials. This generation is looking for meaning, and are willing to give up money to find meaning in their job. Since they will be the employees and customers of tomorrow, and due to the exponential amplification of companies’ good or bad reputation through digital technology, companies not embracing sustainability in their purpose and strategy will likely collapse. This trend is already seen through boycotting messages being spread on social media for brands that are not engaged in a sustainability process, for example those using non-sustainable palm oil.
In summary, global business leaders of tomorrow will have to be the main change agents if they want to preserve the planet for their business to keep existing in the long run, but also if they want to keep attracting and retaining customers and talented employees to deliver the financial results expected by shareholders in the medium to long term.
The most recent global Gallup research on employee engagement show that only 15% of the workforce is engaged in their work. The vast majority of employees, 67% are not engaged, meaning that they show up at work, but lack the energy and passion required to drive performance and innovation. Even worse, 18% are actively disengaged. The latter behave as toxic elements in a corporate culture and undermine the efforts of their engaged colleagues out of frustration and negativity. For each engaged employee, there are 4.5 employees disengaged, and 1.2 employee actively disengaged. Even if you engaged employees have the best intentions and are intrinsically motivated, it is easy to imagine how the other 5.7 can ruin their morale.
When breaking down these figures by region and country, we realize that there are major differences. While engagement in the US is as high as 31%, it goes down to 10% in Western Europe, and even below 6% in France, Spain and Italy. Even worse, in France and Italy, 25% and 30%, respectively, are actively disengaged. For each French employee engaged, 4 are actively disengaged. For each Italian employee engaged, 6 are actively disengaged.
The consequences of these figures do not concern only employee happiness and satisfaction. Gallup has shown that employee engagement drives business performance on metrics such as sales, profitability, productivity, customer satisfaction and employee loyalty.
What are the root causes behind these engagement figures? The lack of sense of purpose in our jobs.
Employees are expecting more and more their job to be linked with a purpose, and the paycheck is not enough to keep them motivated and engaged. Most companies claim on their websites to be driven by a higher purpose, but few of them actually make this purpose come to life in their corporate culture and governance.
The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has published in 2019 a series of articles studying the impact of purpose in companies. They measured how well the company purpose was articulated, how much it inspires employees, how deeply it is integrated, and how well it is recognized. The assessment on those items allowed to calculate a “purpose score”, which correlates with long-term performance.
If the company purpose is well defined, and articulated into the company culture, it can serve as a compass for processes and decision-making. The discussion around company purpose should go way beyond the official purpose that companies put on their websites. Having a stated purpose is not enough. It should permeate all aspects of the company processes and culture in order to orient strategic decisions and drive employee and customer engagement. Three types of decisions should be influenced by an embedded purpose: customer-focused decisions, employee-focused decisions and community-focused decisions. When the company purpose is reflected in all aspects of its operations and culture and is aligned with the individual purpose of most employees, these employees turn into advocates, unleash their creative potential, and can become a driving force to ensure success in achieving that purpose.
The young generation is often criticized by their managers in companies for being difficult to manage, having a low span of attention, and lacking company loyalty. However, while most people currently over
40 years old have spent most of their early lives pursuing financial success before awakening in their late-thirties and searching for their purpose in life, we see a lot of young adults in their twenties already driven by a higher purpose.
All of this gives hope that the rapid shift in consciousness needed to save our planet is still possible. In order to achieve this, we need to raise the collective level of consciousness so that we start thinking as one species with common risks and interests, instead of thinking as countries or companies competing with each other for economic domination. This has to go through individual transformation of the leaders, which have a systemic impact on many people.
Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment firm managing $6 trillion of investments, is insisting for 2 years in a row in his annual letter to CEOs that companies should take responsibility towards the community they serve. He presents it as an imperative for them to survive during the coming $24 trillion wealth transfer between baby boomers and millennials in an increasingly divided world and emphasizes the inextricable link between profit and purpose.
Digital technologies, and in particular smartphones, have taken an impressive place in our lives and impact tremendously the way we think and react. For those of us who discovered social media as adults, it is already hard to imagine our lives without them. We still do not know what the impact will be on digital natives.
They have 4 main types of impact:
Smartphone notifications constantly highjack our attention, leading in particular to a sharp decrease in our capacity to sustain our attention on a particular task. This is reflected in structural changes in the brain. We are getting used to scrolling through short messages, pictures, videos catching our attention for only a few seconds each. Social media posts that are too lengthy usually do not attract our attention, since we have lost the patience to read a whole article, not to mention a whole book. When you keep your phone on the table while engaging in some work, your productivity declines just because of the mere presence of the smartphone, even if it does not ring, since our unconscious mind is expecting notifications.
On top of highjacking our attention, digital technologies hook us in similar ways to drugs. Social media notifications lead to the release of dopamine, the pleasure hormone, which addictive potential leads drug addicts to a self-destructive behavior. The difference with drug addicts is that we are almost all concerned by this addiction. If you prevent someone from picking up the phone or reading an SMS after hearing a notification, he or she will experience a measurable stress reaction similar to our ancestral fight or flight mechanism.
We see more and more families dining out in restaurants where all family members, children and adults, are constantly on their phones instead of talking to each other. This reflects how deep the ongoing societal transformation due to digital technologies is. Several studies have shown that the amount of social media use is linked to social isolation, and higher risk or anxiety and depression, in particular in children and teenagers. Social media lead us to compare our lives with the lives that others project on those networks, which is often very different from their real lives. This comparison can lead to negative feelings, since too many young people judge their self-worth with the amount of recognition they receive on social media.
Social media can also be used to manipulate people into buying things or making electoral choices like the Cambridge Analytica scandal unraveled, but they can also be used to raise awareness on societal or environmental issues. Despite attempts to protect privacy, social media companies collect enormous amounts of data on us, our friend networks, our likes and dislikes, our customer habits, our travels, our political and religious opinions. Since they live out of selling this data to advertising companies, users are indeed their product, not their customers. Communication agencies can make very precise profile of each one of us thanks to the private data we give away for free on social media, allowing them to predict very precisely our customer and voting behaviors, and how susceptible we will be to different types of messages.
The flip side of that phenomenon is that many social movements have been created and coordinated through these platforms, some leading to positive changes. These technologies act as an amplifier and accelerator of social trends, good or bad. On the one hand, one can worry that they push users to feel more isolated and vulnerable to fear and hate messages, but on the other hand, they also provide the hope that positive change can occur at a large scale much faster that any change we have seen before.
Nobody takes pleasure in consciously destroying our planet. Some decision-makers compromise their values for short-term profits, and on the other hand of the spectrum, poor people are simply trying to survive, for example by burning patches of forest to plant crops. In both cases, those destructive actions are driven either by craving or by fear, which are both very primal and animalistic instincts. In the first case, shifting from short-term profit considerations to higher purpose agendas, as Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock investment firm, urges CEOs to do, would address the issue. In the second case, the action of the poor farmer is understandable, and blaming him is not the solution. Our responsibility as a society is to offer alternatives to these people and our responsibility as customers is to stop buying products that we know are not coming from sustainable sources. It is our responsibility as customers to decide whether we want to buy these products or look for more sustainable alternatives.
Another phenomenon which is slowing down positive change is the belief that we are too small to make a difference, and change must come from those in power. Governments have proven very ineffective at driving positive change. We started hearing about the environmental urgency more than30 years ago. The inaction to address those challenges since then has been striking, mostly because politicians have a short-term agenda focused on the next election. Change has to come from each one of us, through our daily decisions, as consumers, as employees, as leaders, as citizens, and as voters.
The more people will raise their level of awareness, and shift from self-centered concerns to caring about our future as a species, the more we have a chance to reverse the damage already done. Evolution has equipped us with higher brain functions essentially driven by our oversized prefrontal cortex. This “thinking” brain part is what makes us human and has the capacity to override our lower emotional centers responsible for our fears and cravings.
Leaders have a great responsibility in that shift, in particular business leaders. As we have seen, embracing sustainability topics is a moral and financial imperative for today’s and tomorrow’s business leaders. By embracing a higher purpose and articulating it in every aspect of the culture and governance of companies, this has the potential to reverse the employee disengagement trend. If employees resonate with the company purpose, and see it becoming a day-to-day reality, they can unleash their creative potential that will ensure company success. Most of our management practices have been put in place in a time when creativity was not such as important aspect of work. For example, research has shown that financial incentives have a negative impact on performance when the job requires some degree of creative thinking, while most companies still try to motivate their employees through financial incentives linked with performance. With the ongoing digital revolution, most jobs that do not require creative thinking will be replaced by Artificial Intelligence, and the only way to remain relevant is to get back to what differentiates us from machines: creative thinking, empathy, human connection, communication and purpose. Leaders of tomorrow have the challenging task to design a work environment where employees can flourish by having a sense of purpose every workday, the autonomy to organize their work the way they want, and the feeling of growing as individuals through their work. In order to do that, they need to tap into their own humanity. Since they are in the center of the spotlight, the individual transformation of the leaders has the potential to spread across the organization through mirroring and emotional contagion.
Finally, the impact of digital technologies on our cognitive, emotional and social skills can be addressed by gaining enough will-power and self-discipline to address our technological addiction, and use those tools wisely for our own benefit. Although figures on digital addiction are worrying, it is possible to think that digital natives will address their digital addiction early on. If they grow up with these technologies present from the start of their lives, one can infer that they will become aware that their career and their future will be compromised if they do not set their own rules to self-regulate. Digital technologies get us addicted by playing on our animalistic instincts (fears and cravings), and therefore re-empowering our higher cognition centers also holds the key to that issue.
In summary, the key to addressing those challenges and starting to think collectively as a species is to reconnect to our human nature and gain mastery over our minds. This is exactly what ancient mindfulness practices are offering. When those practices were developed thousands of years ago, the need to empower our higher minds was not as pressing as it is now. They were not initially intended to manage stress and bring well-being, but to allow practitioners to reach enlightenment through control and mastery of the mind. Gaining back control over our minds is today more important than it has ever been. Millions of mindfulness practitioners have witnessed the effects of those practices since they were developed, and modern neuroscience is now proving their benefits. The amount of scientific research on the effect of mindfulness practices has literally exploded over the last decade, after scientists realized that they are among the most efficient ways to get us out of the negative mental states that we create for ourselves. A meta-analysis conducted in 2015 revealed that Mindfulness interventions are more effective than therapy for treating anxiety disorders. Their efficacy is only surpassed by medication, with all the side effects can accompany them.
Recent advances in Neuroscience offer us an unprecedented understanding of our own minds. They have shifted our understanding from describing the functions of different parts of our brains to how the balance between the activity of several brain networks is affecting our minds for the better or for the worse. Understanding what is happening in our heads and bodies is the first step to mastering it. Recent research has also shed light on how we interact with other people, how our brains can enter in synch during those interactions, both cognitively and emotionally. This tends to reinforce the fact that our minds are much more interconnected than we initially thought. This field is still in infancy and future research might shed further light on our interconnection as human beings.
This knowledge is interesting, but not enough to help us grow, transform and achieve mastery over our minds. This is where Mindfulness comes into play. The main benefit of rooting Mindfulness practice into Neuroscience is that by showing the data about the efficacy of these techniques, and explaining how they act on the different aspects of our nervous systems, those of us who would probably never have tried them can gain interest to test them and put them into practice in their daily lives. In our programs, we have seen many senior executives with no prior interest in Mindfulness being convinced by Neuroscience of the benefits of those practices, and deciding to implement them in their daily lives in order to observe how it can change their lives. After a few months of practice, most of them reported profound shifts on various aspects of their lives.
The changes that we have observed on those leaders inspired us to structure our programs around the main benefits that we have observed:
Mindfulness practices were developed thousands of years ago, mostly in India and Asia, and gained in popularity in the West over the last few decades thanks to the evidence accumulated by scientific research on their efficacy, and to the development of Mindfulness training protocols that has removed the cultural and religious aspects that colored those practices as they were initially taught.
Individuals turn towards Mindfulness for the personal benefits they reap from the practice, but Mindfulness is also making more and more its way into the corporate setting. Google pioneered that trend with the program Search Inside Yourself, created in 2007, which became the favorite training program of Googlers, and is now delivered outside Google by an independent non-profit organization.
Nowadays, many companies embrace Mindfulness trainings to boost their employee’s performance. Just to name a few, eBay, IBM, Intel, Apple, General Electric, Ikea, Lego, Nike… The initial intent behind these trainings might have been to improve employee well-being, but those companies soon realized that on top of being happier, their employees practicing Mindfulness became more performant, both individually and in a teamwork context. This is the reason why many successful business leaders have embraced a daily mindfulness practice, such as Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, or Bill Ford, Executive Chairman of Ford Motor Company.
Our Leading with Wisdom program is not per se a deep dive into Mindfulness practices like MBSR programs can be. It is much more of a door opener for executives who are life-long learners, high performers, challengers, dreamers and leaders who want to make a positive difference in the world. The program taps into 2 aspects of leadership: Leading self and leading others.
Leadership is not anymore about the position you have in the organization, about power or the number of people you manage. It is about becoming more human, and having a positive influence on others to make a difference. Learning how to tap into your inner and outer sources of wisdom is key to thrive in a highly demanding business world.
Contact us if you would like to know more about the Leading with Wisdom program designed to address some of these challenges. It’s our little drop in the ocean, what is yours?
Eve Turow Paul. “Calling All Tweens: Brands begin their push for generation Z”. Forbes 2018
Gallup – “State of the Global workplace report” – 2017
Loh K. and Kanai R. “Higher media multi-tasking activity is associated with smaller gray-matter density in the anterior cingulate cortex.” PLoS One 2014
J.M. Twenge, W.K. Campbell. “Associations between screen time and lower psychological well-being among children and adolescents: Evidence from a population-based study”. Preventive Medicine Reports 12 (2018) 271–283
Youtube video: RSA ANIMATE: “Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us”
Bandelow B. et al., “Efficacy of treatments for anxiety disorders: a meta-analysis”. International Clinical Psychopharmacology 2015
Kersemaekers et al., 2018 – “A workplace mindfulness intervention may be associated with improved psychological well-being and productivity. a preliminary field study in a company setting” – Front. Psychol., 28 February 2018A
