Posted by Kevin Boon. Follow me on Twitter.
Here is a video of Barry Schwartz in a recent talk called The real crisis? We stopped being wise. This talk is a call to bring what Schwartz calls practical wisdom into our world that seems to have gone crazy with bureaucracy, rules and incentives.
Job Descriptions Reflecting Human Interaction
Schwartz sites the example of the job description of a janitor at a hospital and how not a single thing on the job description involves interaction with other human beings. Yet in the reality of a hospital setting and other jobs much of our work (including work of a janitor) involves interaction with human beings.
The Lemonade Story
He relates the story of Dad who unknowingly purchased Mike’s hard lemonade for his 7 year old son at a Detroit Tigers baseball game and the authorities ended up taking away his son. Schwartz says, although there is a place for rules that protect us, many times they prevent us from thinking and they take away our moral skill to make the right decision.
Schwartz says a wise person knows,
- when and how to make the exception to every rule
- how to improvise
- how to use these moral skills in pursuit of the right aims
And finally, a wise person is made not born.
Undermining our Moral Will to do the Right Thing
Society is quick to use rules and incentives and they may work in the short run but Schwartz says, "they create a downward spiral that makes them worse in the long run. Moral skill is chipped away by an over reliance on rules that deprives us of the opportunity to improvise and learn from our improvisations. Moral will is undermined by an incessant appeal to incentives that destroy our desire to do the right thing.”
From a professional level incentives are a war on moral will and do the opposite instead of someone asking “what is my responsibility”, they ask “what is my interest.”
Work-Life Balance & Practical Wisdom
Work-life balance have a direct connection to practical wisdom. Although they have a place companies who get too bogged down in rules, bureaucracy and incentives generally will create an environment where moral will is compromised, competitiveness rules, creativity and teamwork stagnate and overall job satisfaction declines.
Finding innovative ways to bring practical wisdom into our work lives is one way to improve our overall work-life balance.
How do we Re-Moralize Work?
Schwartz closes by saying we need to find ways to re-moralize work and celebrate those who do the right things. Find ways to bring practical wisdom into our jobs and have less reliance on rules, bureaucracy and incentives. Create job descriptions that begin to identify the human part to our responsibilities and enable us to take action because it is right, not because it’s in the rules or if I do it I’ll get paid.
He closes with a quote from Barack Obama who said,
We must ask, not just is it profitable, but is it right.
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