Maslow In Advance

Maslow was onto something. We all have needs, from baseline to advanced. Our ultimate purpose is just that - purpose. When we feel aligned with a purpose, we truly come alive.

Advanced Time is travelling backwards. That is to say, it carries the future to us. We live in continuous perception of Retarded Time, which carries the past into the future. Along with these directional waves, you have all the possibilities available in superposition - a feature of quantum mechanics that makes sure every option is open to you at all times. The whole Time mechanism, were we to make an image of it, would look much more like a ring doughnut than an arrow.

This is why we get stuck in anxieties about the past and fears of the future - we do not understand how to handle Time. We don't perceive the torus at all, we think in straight lines, which is a big mistake. No wonder we have trouble with Uncertainty!

Advanced Time is a real thing - read about it here

While Google erases disability-related observance periods from its calendar and oligarchs threaten to destabilise the environment, we can only view this era as our last opportunity to make Change work in our favour. With no time to be lost, here are some helpful signposts to getting the best from the journey.

Empathic Leadership. Yes, some still think it's fluffy-bunny and several million have been bitten in trying to do it half-heartedly and coming unstuck. Resistance is high - not because empathy and engagement is a waste of time (>£300billion a year lost to disengagment in the UK is no fairy tale), but because it's scary, unknown, and no-one seems quite sure how to make it stick.

While there are no magic wands, there is a formula that - as a baseline template - works every time in bringing people up from despondent inertia to enthusiastic proactivity. Bear in mind that to successfully launch it, someone from outside your company needs to light the blue touch paper, because confirmation bias has everyone assuming that they know everyone else's agenda ("You're the manager, you just want me to work harder so you look better." "You're such a pleb, all you want is a wage rise," etc etc.) which is why most change initiatives of a people-centric nature fall flat after a few weeks.

Anyhow, whatever route you choose to take, this is a great roadmap:

First, take your fifth-grade Maslow model and check off which elements your workplace satisfies. However short it falls of Self-Actualisation, you can only blaze your way through the tests, put the actions into place and reach the point whereby your people are happy to come to work, feel good about what they are doing and enjoy being there as a major part of their lives (Richard Branson, among others, said you should train your staff so they can leave and treat them so they want to stay).

When you have a workforce that feels good about itself (remember, people need this - self-esteem is essential and for many it's a hard ask before they even turn up at the door) you can provide them with opportunities to make Continuous Improvement a reality. How many C.I. initiatives did you take up that were sustainably successful? Where is 6Sigma now? Exactly. You cannot get the formula off the shelf - it's in your people and you have to find it there.

Before you can get this far, you need to create a place of safety and belonging. No extra risk assessments, but plenty more opportunities to connect, portals to communicate, chances to socialise and reasons to look after each other. 

No-one is looking after anyone when it's every man for himself. It's not about the money - it's all about the mentality.

Whatever your workplace looks like, it can be made to adopt a state of excellence and its people can be motivated to make it succeed. You can turn a dusty, creaking shackful of engineers into a shining beacon of brilliant performance. But before anything at all can happen, you have to believe. 

In yourself, in your people, in your world line.

And that, I'd venture to suggest, is where we come unstuck a lot of the time.

🫲 All these worlds are yours. Use them together, use them in peace.