psychology « ia play

Recently at work I received a survey request from a member of our HR team. She is studying for a further degree and was collecting data for her dissertation on organisational psychology.

At its heart the survey was evaluating what I though the values of the BBC were and how well this matched my own. Her hypothesis was that the closer the fit between my values and how I perceived the BBC’s values then the more likely I would be to be satisfied with my work and actively commited to it. I would be less likely to be intending to find a new job.

It was an interesting task given that the BBC has a clearly articulated set of values:

Trust is the foundation of the BBC: we are independent, impartial and honest.

Audiences are at the heart of everything we do.

We take pride in delivering quality and value for money.

Creativity is the lifeblood of our organisation.

We respect each other and celebrate our diversity so that everyone can give their best.

We are one BBC: great things happen when we work together.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/purpose/

The values are on our diaries, our ID cards and displayed 10ft tall in the entrance to the Media Centre. When they were first announced years ago I was skeptical of their usefulness as they seemed to boil down to the staff being told to ‘be good’. Uncontroversial but hardly profound.

Reflecting on this now I realise that ‘be good’ has two meanings and they pretty much sum up how I see the BBC’s values: making high quality products and programmes whilst playing nicely.

We may fall short at times but the goals remain pretty appealing.

I read yesterday in London Lite that £14 million from the National Lottery has been awarded to two projects with the aim of making London a happier place.

Today in London Lite the letters page is full of outrage:

“why don’t they just make a big bonfire out of the notes? Same effect”

“what a stupid idea. Why do they think that wasting more and more money on things like this is a good idea. Londoners are miserable – no amount of cash will make them smile!”

“what a way to waste money. Throwing cash at this initiative is about as worthwhile as flushing it down the toilet. People aren’t suddenly going to be happy because someone shows them how to plant vegetables, it’s much deeper than that.”

I’m guessing that the last correspondent never saw Making Slough Happy or read any of psychologist Dr Richard Stevens’ research. One of the ten steps to happiness listed in the programme was “plant something and nurture it”.

The two schemes are Well London and Active 8 London, run by the Peabody Trust, a charitable housing association.

Well London projects include:

schemes to make it easier to buy quality, cheap, local food
cook and eat clubs to increase rates of healthy eating
training local people with direct experience of mental ill health to deliver mental health awareness training
using the arts and cultural activity to improve environments and provide accessible physical activities
increasing physical activity levels through increasing the range of sports and active recreation activities available to the community

Active 8 London plans to set up:

food days to broaden people’s understanding of nutrition
gardening schemes to show high-rise residents how to grow their own vegetables
a week of events and workshops that will address common mental health problems
the Fifty-Five Alive Club that will lead social activities for older people
a project that will provide exercise sessions and advice in women only environments
Pukka Tukka, which is a project to encourage single men off takeaways and processed foods and show them how to make healthy, fresh meals on a budget

So you can see why the correspondents are so disgruntled. Projects to encourage us to eat better and exercise more, what a terrible waste of money. After all £14 million does seem like a lot of money.

Amongst the information to support Well London’s bid is the fact that “ten per cent of people over the age of 65 are malnourished and account for approximately half of the £7.3 billion per year that malnutrition costs the UK.” Which isn’t the sort of information that London Lite has room for.

£7.3 billion? Now, that is a lot of money.

I’ve been reading Happiness – Lessons from a new science which began like an economist’s version of Authentic Happiness. So far so familiar. But then Layard moved onto the role of TV in our current state of happiness. He takes at face value the research suggesting TV makes us more violent and more miserable and didn’t really acknowledge that there was any academic debate about this at all (see Moving Experiences and Everything Bad is Good For You for alternative academic and populist perspectives).

I might have been more interested in the arguments than TV makes us unhappy if Layard hadn’t so unquestionably accepted the doctrine that TV makes us violent. Watching rubbish TV certainly stops me doing stuff. Some of that stuff is the dull routine of washing up, tidying, and mucking out the animals but it also stops me writing, reading, and making. It wastes my time. Or rather it is how I waste my time.

But watching brilliant TV is no less virtuous than watching a good film, play or musical. The problem seems to be with watching TV as a routine activity rather than a carefully chosen programme and so the arguments seem warped.

In the hierarchy of sinful media it seems that video games are the worst, then television, and then cinema. Novels and theatre aren’t on the scale. No-one tutted when I was taken to the National by my English teacher to see the gore-fest that is Macbeth. And that was real 3-d people conducting very believable acts of violence a few feet away.

At a historical re-creation in my teens, I remember chatting to a mother of two young children. She had got rid of the TV when her children were born and had been pleased that the toddlers were growing up peaceful and happy. Recently she said, her husband had taken the children to a medieval re-enactment that had featured jousting. She sighed as her youngest son galloped past us, twig masquerading as joust, endeavouring to impale any convenient passer-by. The next time I saw them, the TV had been re-instated.

I’m going to persevere with Happiness, hopefully the economic sections will include more sophisticated positions than the Daily Mail-esque ‘TV as moral crisis’.

This ramble through positive psychology, flow and signature strengths does finally bring me back to ia play.

Seligman defined the Engaging Life as knowing what your signature strengths are, and then recrafting your life to use those strengths to have more flow in life.

Beyond that he defines the Meaningful Life as using your signature strengths in the service of something that you believe is larger than you are.

So this something bigger than me, it is just that life should be more fun, more playful. It doesn’t have to be so serious, does it?

Work should be more playful. And for me that means information architecture should be more playful . I think it would probably work better that way.

Related posts

hate your job? then get another one.

For plenty of people that I know, changing your life and the way you feel about your work means getting a new job. There are many ways of changing your job and not all of them involve quitting. Quitting is dramatic but that’s the only action that you are taking control of. You are still relying on the world around you to improve and make you happier.

Don’t have a cool job? Csikszentmihalyi makes a big deal about the happiest man he’s met being a welder. So choose what you want – a job everyone else thinks is cool or one that makes you happy.

Signature strengths aren’t ‘programming’ or ‘horse-riding’ or ‘surgery’. Strengths like ‘zest’ and ‘social intelligence’ can be used in an awful lot of jobs. The key to ‘recrafting’ is that it is a bit about doing the same job differently and a lot about looking at the same job differently. It may ultimately mean quitting but it is about having a goal for your career that has very little to do with traditional career paths and promotion ladders.

When did you last have fun at work? Problem with this question is the answers can be a bit trite and not really work-related (gossiping at the water cooler, when the boss was off).

Much more interesting is when did you last experience flow at work? What were you doing? For me, this week, it was an utterly absorbing conversation. It was supposed to be half-an-hour catch-up in a local coffee shop. By the time we paused we had sat through an entire lunch rush and not noticed. The conversation was two and half hours. Classic flow.

I was talking to a colleague who I think is a very smart guy, but I don’t always agree with straight off. We were talking about the future of our teams. We’ve been through some bad times and we were cheerfully wondering if we’re doomed or if there was stuff we could do about it.

According to the authentic happiness questionnaire, my top signature strengths are

love of learning,
hope, optimism, and future-mindedness
judgment, critical thinking, and open-mindedness
curiosity and interest in the world

So you could say the conversation was quite so engaging because I was thinking optimistically about the future, showing curiousity, learning a different perspective, and subjecting it to critical thinking.

When I think about I can remember quite a few other great conversations that share these properties. There’s plenty of ways I can productively do more of that in my day to day work. There are lots of people I ought to talk to more and plenty of them that have challenging perspectives.

It isn’t all about changing the tasks. You can always recraft what happens in your head. The things you focus on. The story you tell yourself about your work and why you do it.

Occasionally your work is fundamentally at odds with your signature strengths. You might have a problem if honesty is your big signature strength and you are working as a salesman for a product you don’t believe in. Sometimes you have to quit

so the ‘engaging life’ route to happiness means using your signature strengths.

Most of my experience of career coaching and training has taught me to focus on developing my weaknesses (or opportunities for development in training-speak) as these are likely to hold me back. Seligman doesn’t say we should forget about developing these weaknesses, just that our lives should be focused on our signature strengths

Try the signature strengths questionnaire

Your signature strengths are the things you are naturally good at. You can develop skills in other areas with application but it is much easier to get pleasure and satisfaction using these natural strengths than a ‘borrowed’ strength.

So if you are struggling with your career rather than examining your weaknesses and looking to improve them, you should look at how you can re-craft your work to utilise your signature strengths. If this is possible it seems obvious that you are more likely to succeed at an approach that comes naturally to you. And you’ll have more fun along the way.

This is the point when my team whinge at the me that this is all very well and good but they are being paid to do this stuff and the business doesn’t care if they would rather be doing ‘innovation’ cause that’s what Martin Seligman says would make them happy. Which is why we come to recrafting…

I’ve been reading lots of Mihaly Csikszentmihayli (pronounced “ME-high CHICK-sent-me-high-ee”), famous for his concept of ‘flow’ , including Flow, Creativity and this interview in Wired.
The basic concept is that “Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity”. There has to be a balance between feeling challenged and feeling skillful (my parents first attempt to teach me and my husband Bridge left us feeling significantly more challenged than skillful).

Games and play are often the epitome of flow, although flow can be different in that we don’t always consider it ‘fun’ at the time but it adds to our general well-being and sense of happiness about our lives. Video games in particular seem to achieve the timeless quality of the flow state.

But it’s not all about leisure stuff. Work begins to be magical and not such a chore in those times when you experience flow. Those times when you look up and realise everyone else when home hours ago and the cleaners are irritated because you are getting in their way. I’ve got better over the years in identifying what types of stuff get that reaction from me and building my career around it. But I’m also interested in how we create those experiences for our colleagues using the tools we build and the consumers of our products.

Authentic Happiness is one of my ‘beloved’ books. It isn’t directly about play and it certainly isn’t about information architecture but it overlaps in its advocacy of an approach to your (working) life to achieve greater engagement and happiness.

It is written by Martin Seligman, a psychologist known for his work on the idea of ‘learned helplessness’, and his contributions to the field of Positive Psychology. The nice thing about “Positive psychology” is it is the study of optimal human functioning, focusing on mental wellness rather than mental illness, for once. Seligman’s book ‘Authentic Happiness’ covers his theories of how it is possible to be happier — “to feel more satisfied, to be more engaged with life, find more meaning, have higher hopes, and probably even laugh and smile more, regardless of one’s circumstances”. And who is going to argue with that?

He describes three approaches to happiness:

the Pleasant Life (having as many pleasures as possible and having the savoring and mindfulness skills to amplify the pleasures)

the Engaging Life (knowing what your signature strengths are, and then recrafting your work, love, friendship, leisure and parenting to use those strengths to have more flow in life)

the Meaningful Life (using your signature strengths in the service of something that you believe is larger than you are)

What I like about his definition of the engaging life (and the bit that is most useful in a professional sense) is the phrase ‘recrafting’. He doesn’t say ‘changing’ your work, he doesn’t insist you have to quit your desk job and become a poet. He says you have to recraft your work to use your signature strengths to achieve more flow. I want to talk about those three concepts: Flow, Signature Strengths, and Recrafting.

ia play

the good life in a digital age

Category Archives: psychology

caring about what your company does

londoners angry about grants to make them happier

book: Happiness by Richard Layard

the meaningful life is a playful one

recrafting your work

using your signature strengths to achieve flow

book: Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

book: Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman