To A New Future

Whether change is something we initiate or how we adjust to changes in our world, making change happen takes courage and pragmatism, creativity and passion, collaboration and resiliency. Each of these are strengths that become more possible when we intentionally practice happiness.

In any change process, we hold a handful of common intentions.

• Changing how we define what matters
• Changing how things happen and work
• Changing how people engage and collaborate
• Changing how people lead and take initiative
• Changing how resources are shared and engaged

These become more possible when people practice the prime happiness languages of appreciation, generosity, interest, lightness, and easy.

Appreciation is thanking, savoring and visioning. Generosity is presence, sharing, and giving. Interest is exploring, learning, and experimenting. Lightness is spontaneity, informality, and humor. Easy is simplifying, uncluttering, and mindfulness.

We can use each language as a principle that guides us in any change process. We look for ways to use these principles in how we research, design, organize, plan, build, test, launch, and scale change. Using the principles simply means raising them as questions and intentions in the conversations we have. The quality of our outcomes always reflect the quality of our conversations.

When people aren’t practicing happiness in any change process, they’re instead whining, worrying, wallowing, waiting, blaming, excluding, resisting, assuming, arguing, bullying, evading, defending, competing, complaining, and complicating. This is why we observe how when people are unhappy they have the least capacity for initiating, participating in and contributing to positive change of any kind.

The way we practice happiness trumps everything.

It doesn’t matter if we have the right people, pressures, incentives, and resources at the table. It doesn’t matter how educated or wealthy people are or aren’t. Differences and similarities don’t necessarily matter either way. Nor does history guarantee anything in a largely unknowable future.

What matters is the degree to which people practice happiness individually and collectively in the process of change.

Fortunately, we now know that happiness can be learned. People can increase their happiness literacy and language fluency. They can learn about the abundant and emergent happiness research and applications. 

The most interesting and profound shift is in their realizing how much happiness matters and how it can move from being situationally dependent to intentionally practicable. They discover that happiness doesn’t have to be a matter of chance when it can be a matter of choice.

When people become more empowered in their capacity for happiness, they are more naturally engaged in positive change. When we want to make a difference, happiness makes the difference.

Even though the idea of literacy is usually sequestered to the realms of reading, it refers more broadly to knowledgeability.

So we can talk about happiness literacy. This is knowing a bit about the neuroscience and social science research that demythologizes much about conventional assumptions about happiness. It also means developing some fluency in the happiness languages, the core of which include appreciation, generosity, interest, lightness, and easy.

The research basics include understanding that the most accessible forms of happiness we have are practices that are best characterized as languages because they intentionally manifest happiness in its expression, the way language both expresses and evokes reality. It also outlines how happiness rewires our brains in ways that increase our set points. These are the baselines of happiness we return to soon after significant life events.

Until people gain even basic literacy in happiness, their happiness is more chance than choice, more situationally contingent than intentional. More sustainable well-being begins with literacy. If we want a healthier, more engaged, and contributing society, it will always begin with all dimensions of literacy. Happiness will be core to this intention.

Even though many organizations give fashionable lip service to collaboration, the future will belong to those who co-create it. Collaboration works when it is more a principle in practice than espoused value. Reality is that the future is abundant with possibilities that can only be realized in the intersecting space of many heads, hearts, and hands.

We can collaborate globally and inter-nationally, politically and civically, professionally and personally. We can do together what no one can do apart, in isolation or opposition. Many of the most intractable and wicked problems around today will only become less relevant through new collaborations.

It is not enough to insist or invite collaboration. It is also not enough to naively expect that putting people in common spaces or projects, no matter how sexy or significant, will automatically lead to collaboration.

Collaboration is most natural for people who are happier together. It can happen with unhappy people, maybe, and when it does it is more difficult than it needs to be. We have long been constrained by the mythologies that good things should happen when people are not happy, and yes compliance and competition are possible in an unhappy environment.

Collaboration is another story altogether.

The key is to design happiness into the process up front. This means designing happiness principles into the quality of conversations that makes us more likely to be competitive of collaborative together.

Engaging some of the happiness principles makes actual collaboration more possible. Here are examples.

• Shared Resonance/ The quality of our relationships are always equal to the quality of stories we share that inspire us to be present with one another

• Shared Dreams/ The scope and quality of new possibilities in the present are equal to the scope and quality of the possibilities we declare about the future

• Shared Engagement/ People appreciate when power and responsibility are shared because people are most committed to that which they help decide and create

• Shared Generosity/ Building relationships is accelerated by expressions of generosity in the form of shared resources, talents, and assets

• Shared Learning / Our capacity for change is equal to our capacity for learning; when people cease inquiry, they cease their capacity for change

• Shared Appreciation / When we savor our progress and achievements, we are energized to continue contributing to our common success

These principles shape corresponding conversations that help collaborations start, grow, and mature because they design happiness into the process. Here are 6 examples.

• What stories express what brings us together?
• What matters to us and why?
• What decisions can we make together?
• What talents, knowledge, and resources do we have to share?
• What can we learn together?
• What are we most appreciative of achieving?

These conversations, inspired by happiness principles, have the power to build collaborators that make a difference. They have the power to create bonds, align perspectives, and energize common action. They make it more possible for us to be happier together, which enables collaborations that work.

These conversations work whether we have a small collaboration of two or three, or large collaborations of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people. They are particularly useful when people come together as peers. And they work whether people are geographically located or work together virtually.

As always, it’s about the power of the conversations, and in this model, it’s about the way happiness principles inform the possibilities of what we can do together.

In a world where change has become more and more inevitable and vital, why do some change efforts in organizations and communities succeed while others struggle? Why do some change efforts seem more destined for thrivancy and others for stuckness? Common folklore pins the tail of blame on the donkeys of inadequate leadership, resources or people’s capacity for resilience.

As it turns out, the core difference between change efforts that flourish and those that flounder is in the working principles that inspire and inform them.

We can assess the quality of any change we’re engaged in by the quality of the principles we’re working from. Our working principles are our narratives about what matters and what works.

Working from the right principles shapes the conversations that engage people in change that matters and works. From a design perspective, the journey and destination are always about the principles we work from.

Here are 16 working principles that make positive change more possible. They are happiness principles - principles based on the prime practices of happiness. They derive their power from the now well documented fact that the happier people are, the more adaptive and proactive they are with change. Each principle designs happiness into the process.

We use these principles to organize all of our key conversations, planning efforts, and projects. We use them to shape how we engage diverse perspectives in alignment of passions and the engagement of strengths.

1. Courage/ Passion for change is always equal to our sense of courage and courage is faith in ourselves and each other

2. Strength-based focus/ The more we focus on our assets - our knowledge, talents, and connections - the more courage and wisdom we have to make any kind of change possible

3. Engagement/ People appreciate when power and responsibility are shared because people are most committed to that which they help decide and create

4. Gratitude/ Gratitude inspires optimism and a sustainable basis for the happiness that comes from generosity

5. Declaring possibilities/ The scope and quality of new possibilities in the present are equal to the scope and quality of the possibilities we declare about the future

6. Rewiring our brain for happiness/ The thinking and action habits we cultivate that welcome happiness change the structure of our brain in ways that make us more receptive to joy and joy makes us more interested in and receptive to change

7. Celebrating progress/ Marking progress with storytelling creates personal satisfaction and shared resonance that inspires more momentum and collaboration

8. Change resistance/ People do not intrinsically resist change, they resist change that excludes their gifts from being freely engaged

9. Trust/ Trust becomes more possible in a context cultivated by generous sharing of knowledge, resources, and talents

10. Generosity/ Building and restoring relationships is accelerated by expressions of generosity; generosity fuels the power of the commons, the spaces of accessible resources, talents, and assets

11. Power of wow/ The most powerful inspiration of happiness for the happiest people on the planet is the joy of discovery, exploration, and learning

12. The learning imperative/ Our capacity for change is equal to our capacity for learning; when people cease inquiry, they cease their capacity for change

13. Agile organization/ we achieve optimum success when we work only on the most important things and keep our organization resilient to continuous change in our learning and environment

14. Lightheartedness and creativity/ Ha-ha is the mother of ah-ha; ah-ha is the mother of wow; when work becomes play, more new possibilities engage and enliven everyone; some new possibilities are only visible through the lens of a smile, or from the whale’s belly of laughs

15. Simple is an asset/ Simplifying the complicated energizes us with courage to take on more in the direction of the impossible

16. Power of easy/ Making anything easier makes it more attractive and possible; there are fewer bonds stronger than simple and valuable

This whole business of positioning happiness at the core of our success indices is grounded in the principle that happier people do better in life and work. Happiness also makes change easier and more impactful. Current research evidence tips overwhelmingly in favor of this perspective.

Here are 10 qualities of people who are happier through the five prime practices of happiness: appreciation, generosity, interest, lightness, and easy.

• They are energized by progress
• They are more feel more grateful than entitled
• They live and work with passion
• They are more flexible and resilient to change
• They learn and discover more
• They share more of what and who they know with others
• They are more generous and present with others
• They are less intimidated by the difficult and impossible
• They are easier to live and work with
• They are more enjoyable to be around

The less happy people are, the more they experience and exhibit alternative qualities:

• They are more focused on what they don't have and can't do than what they do
• They feel more entitled than grateful
• They look for substitutes for happiness in incentives and proxies
• They are sensitive and reluctant to change and novelty
• They are attached to single narratives to the exclusion of learning
• They expect others to be self-sufficient and not needing help
• They protect what they have and see sharing as loss 
• They postpone the difficult and resist the impossible
• They are difficult to work and live with
• They are always looking for heroes or scapegoats to their suffering

Given this profile, making happiness a central indicator of personal and collective thrivancy promises to strengthen relationships in couples and families, communities and networks, organizations and social groups.

Supporting the cultivation of happiness is about education. Period. It is about people becoming more literate in the practices of happiness, more knowledgable about the science now behind happiness, and understanding how to help make happiness a core success indicator in personal and collective contexts.

As it becomes more evident that conventional economic indicators have no power as proxies for indices of well-being, we are compelled to experiment with fresh sets of indicators.

Based on my research for “The Joy of Thriving” here are five simple and powerful happiness indicators for any community, whether we talk about neighborhoods, organizations, networks, villages, and regions. Each manifests one of the five prime practices of happiness.

The statements for each indicator represent examples of survey and interview items we can use to have people rate their experience in community. There are limitless ways for communities to use the happiness practices as design principles in scaling well-being toward the cultivation of happier communities.

The five happiness indicators for taking well-being to SCALE:

Storytelling/ the practice of appreciation … I know and tell stories of personal and local progress, achievements, and dreams

Commons/ the practice of generosity … I am able to contribute to and make use of local available tangible and intangible assets

Access/ the practice of easy … It is easy to navigate my community geographically and virtually

Learning/ the practice of interest … I am able to learn from and teach others in my community

Enjoyment/ the practice of lightness … I have diverse ways to have fun in my community

The happier communities become, the more possible it is for the cultivation of sustainable entrepreneurship, local living economies, positive change, leadership, citizenship and communities that are more friendly in attracting and growing people and groups that add to community aliveness, meaning, and thrivancy.

The happiness principle at work is simple and powerful: when people are happier, they have more faith in themselves and each other that translates into a community that more easily attracts and grows the kind of people and groups that lead to growing personal and collective well-being.

In this work in progress, “To A New Future: Rewriting The Future Of Change,” it’s interesting to dissolve the boundaries between what we call organizations, communities, and networks. Creating a coherent model for change suggests a unified approach to all three.

Although they are useful distinctions, they mask the common threads of change requirements implied in each. In an intention of simplicity, we eschew the distinctions in favor of a singular approach. We don’t need a different model for organizations, communities, and networks.

Different models at least tacitly support the idea of organizations that aren’t also communities, networks that also don’t act like organizations, and communities that are not also networks. The integration of the three gives each of them more power, and certainly fuses this power into a larger whole that encompasses and transcends their sum.

So instead we can simply talk about these spaces as “where people come together.”

This does not deny the customary differences among these three landscapes that play along several lines of dynamics:

• How formal and informal power is centralized, distributed and manifest as positional authority, control over assets, expertise and knowledge, majority voice pressure, economics, and social influence

• How much access people have to others, resources in the commons, learning, survival essentials, meaningful work, medicine, and transportation

• How much freedom people have to dream of a future different from the past, take action on these dreams, and invite others into these actions

• How people are bounded by formal and informal rules, laws, customs, regulations, incentive and cost systems

In search of a unified model of change across these distinctions and dynamics, we work from a handful of simple and powerful principles:

• Whatever structures exist today that were responsible for past successes might have no power to create a different future

• People are capable of self-organizing amazing things when they share irresistible dreams

• Personal and collective thrivancy is directly related to the quality and diversity of generosity and reciprocity connections between and among people

• Happiness is the highest principle behind every individual and common well-being indicator we use to measure thrivancy on any scale

These principles make it less necessary for us to labor around the jargon of structures and roles, as in references to organizations, communities, networks, leaders, employees, citizens, officials, consumers, and the like. Instead we more simply talk about people who have what they love to see and what they have to engage in creating the future they wish to see.

People are more free to create and connect in change when they are not distracted or encumbered by hyperconcern with structures and roles. This leaves people who are assigned, elected, or self-appointed stewards of structures and roles to continue supporting continuities with the past by defending and protecting them.

When we are committed to change, we don’t care if our context is called an organization, community, or network. We’re about change and that’s what matters.

Organizations, communities, and networks have several features and functions in common that can distract from the simple intentionality of creating and connecting in change:

• There are always people who want to be in charge, lead, and control things whether formally or informally

• There are always assets that exist in the commons, that must be competed for, and that are protected from access

• There are always documented and undocumented political, social, financial, and sanctioned lines that are only crossed at some costs

• There are always what are normatively considered the right and wrong ways to do things and get things done and people who like to spend time reminding people which is when

And that’s just how it is. Our focus is change and that’s where we put our attention, focus our aspirations, and engage our assets.

One of the most promising trends in local living economics is the growth of local food webs.

Food webs are the social, economic and cultural ecosystems that give rise to food as central to local thrivancy. Local means neighborhoods, villages, cities, and regions.

The business case for local food webs is systemically multidimensional. Locally grown food is a direct and measurable route to health care, jobs, lifelong learning, resource engagement, and community building. It is the alternative to food deserts, manufacturing and service job declines, the difficult to employ, and the immense loss of local dollars to non-local food suppliers.

There are four kinds of contributors to local food webs: cultivators, consumers, catalysts, and connectors.

• Cultivators bring harvest to markets. They include rural and urban farmers and gardeners.
• Consumers buy products from cultivators. They include retail, commercial and institutional.
• Catalysts build grower capacity. They include suppliers, investors, educators and transporters.
• Connectors bridge people and groups. They include network weavers, storytellers, and markets.

Growing food webs means growing the scope and collaborations among each four kinds of contributors. Because of the symbiodependencies among each kind of contributor, any growth in one leads to growth in others. Food webs are opportunity and asset commons, distinctly different in form and function from free markets where growth in any contributor sector doesn’t necessarily lead to the growth in others, and can even work to reduce other sectors.

Three simple and powerful ways to grow local food webs include initiating small projects, convening cross-sector events, and starting a learning sharing website.

Small projects create new collaborations resulting in unlimited possibilities of new distribution channels, new growing technologies and methodologies, new product markets, and new education strategies.

Cross-sector events can engage people in the open space of identifying assets, opportunities, and projects. These can cross contributor sectors, geographic sectors, and industry sectors. They can be large or small scale, stand-alone or ongoing events, empowered by network weavers.

Learning sharing websites host the posting and sharing of professional and peer-to-peer education and training videos, podcasts, and articles. It becomes a valuable self-organizing commons for building capacity and connections.

We now have evidence that happier people lead to higher levels of passion and engagement at work. Happier people also lead to happier customers and clients. And happiness at work spreads into the rest of people’s health, relationships, life, and well-being.

Leaders in organizations, formal and informal, are uniquely positioned to cultivate a happiness-friendly organizational culture.

Life in the Old Days of Happiness Illiteracy

Before we had the compelling and growing body of research on happiness we have today, happiness was considered to be a byproduct of genetic predispositions or circumstantial variables. The old narrative placed happiness outside the actionable domains of intention and learning.

In this world, the most a leader could hope for is being given enough surrogate resources to literally “compensate” people for their intrinsic and intractable unhappiness. This is the model that has been the foundation of the current state of organizational happiness. In the US alone, the 75% of employees who are mostly unhappy at work costs over $300 billion annually.

The New Happiness Imperative

Thanks to the emergence of happiness research over the past decade, we have come a long way in understanding the neuroscience of happiness and the practical and empowering implications.

We now know that happiness is a practice. It is a function of how we focus and engage in our world. And as such, happiness can be learned and cultivated. It is an intentional possibility and actionable strategy when we know how to make it actionable.

In “The Joy of Thriving” we talk about five prime practices of happiness that makes happiness more accessible anywhere anytime: appreciation, generosity, interest, lightness, and easy. Each has the power as a principle of practice to transform leadership.

Transformed leadership creates happier organizations because it designs conversations and practices that invite the practices of happiness. The evidence is now clear: happiness is a choice of how we focus and engage in our world; it can be learned and developed; and it has profound implications for personal and collective thrivancy.

The Possibilities of Transformed Leadership

Here is an introduction to some of the possibilities.

Appreciation We can begin or end meetings with people telling success and progress stories featuring explicit appreciation for contributors to each scenario. We can schedule time for people to regularly email or text thanks to someone who has made their life in any way easier or better. We can invite people to design beauty into their work spaces. We can regularly invite people to share their vision for their work group’s impact.

Generosity We can set a practice expectation that everyone in our group spends up to a specific percentage, like 5%, of their week giving someone else help and receiving help from others in the organization. We can make some of our spaces and resources available to people in other work groups. We can set the expectation that everyone will weekly do some random act of kindness for someone else.

Interest We can ask everyone to set quarterly new learning targets and give people time to share their gains. We can sustain accessible talent directories for anyone looking for peer2peer learning. We can translate all performance and outcome measures into learning measures that we share as a work group. We structure every meeting and presentation with participant inquiries and questions, which is to say shift from an information push to pull model, to build a vibrant and relentless culture of curiosity.

Lightness We as leaders can model a healthy sense of humor and perspective. We can have regular half-days where everyone goes outside the organization to explore and play with something or someone new. We can create and utilize physical and virtual water coolers for impromptu conversations that make strategic serendipity more possible. We can actively encourage the ha-ha as provocation to the ah-ha.

Easy We can consistently engage people in simplifying anything: systems, decision making, and access to resources. We can use simple and easy as design principles in designing every aspect of what we produce and how we produce it including how research, communication, learning, and accomplishments occur. We can teach people how to have easier conversations, organize projects and time more easily, and make their happiness at work more contagious to the rest of their lives.

The Call for Change

It takes a whole new kind of leadership to create happier organizations. Current practices, even those deemed unquestionable, are yielding high levels and costs of unhappiness at work. We have sufficient data demonstrating that. There is no evidential support for conventional leadership practices that naively expect performance to exceed attitude.

Fortunately, making the transition doesn’t require expensive investments in capital improvements. Happiness is a practice not a purchase. It starts with giving formal and informal leaders in organizations new levels of happiness literacy. Leaders will care about happiness indicators in their organizations in an actionable way at the rate they are exposed to the compelling research on happiness that invites practical everyday implication possibilities.

The new research profoundly holds old management practices and perspectives directly accountability for the fact that worldwide, according to Gallup’s annual research, fewer than 20% of employees feel the happiness of daily engagement of their strengths by their employers. And recent studies indicate that the vast majority of managers are equally unaware of this reality, the costs of it, and the way forward.

The way forward is educating leaders so they discover and deploy the power to create happier organizations where, at the end of the day, everyone gains.