F**k Purpose!
4 Reasons Why New Narratives Cement the Old Status Quo and Avoid the Real Work — and Why Good Is the New Black
(25 min read)
(25 min read)
Good LIFE AND GOOD SOCIETY
Re-Enchanting our organisations: Making work meaningful
Meet Frank Martela, a refreshingly unconventional Finnish philosopher on a stimulating quest to unlock the secrets of a meaningful life. Frank melds Dewey's pragmatism, the insights of Self-Determination Theory, and the moral compass of Virtue Ethics to develop a journey for transforming individuals and organizations. Together, we unravel the challenges of his theoretical project and dive into its practical implications - from 'caring connections' at work and the hurdles of self-management to the benefits of systems intelligence. Join the conversation if you still wonder whether people in the Nordics are happier because of saunas and heavy metal, and, of course, if you are keen to pursue a more meaningful life at work.
Frank Martela
Core Concepts: Self-Determination Theory (SDT), Pragmatism
Unique Propositions: Meaning of Life / Meaningful Work
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Why is the interview important? Who are we talking to?
DISCOVER THE DIALOGUE WITH
FRANK MARTELA
We approached Frank for several reasons. Firstly, we wanted to get clearer about a possible distinction between "goodness" and "meaning", as well as between normative ethics and mostly descriptive psychology. Helpfully, Frank has dedicated decades of his researcher life to questions about meaning, meaningfulness, significance and self-realization at work or in life. Secondly, we wanted to explore whether and how virtue ethics could benefit from integration with (positive) psychology, as a normative foundation for our theory. Frank has developed multiple iterations of a practical framework that seemed very interesting. This also links to our interview with Blaine Fowers which seeks to explain "telos" in anthropological and evolutionary terms. Finally, we wanted to again explore (the limitations) of pragmatism in the context of morality. Here, we also connect with our interview with Ed Freeman.
KEY LEARNING GOALS (click LIGHTBULB to see the INQUIRY MAP)
- What is the history of pragmatism? What are its ontological and ethical limitations?
- What is a meaningful life? What is meaningful work?
- How can work become more meaningful?
✿ ABOUT FRANK MARTELA
Frank Martela is a cross-disciplinary researcher with a PhD in both philosophy (University of Helsinki) and organisational research (Aalto University). He is a University lecturer at Aalto University and docent of well-being psychology at the University of Tampere and has spoken to hundreds of audiences worldwide, with lectures at Universities on four continents, including Stanford University and Harvard University. His steadily expanding research was published in numerous academic journals within psychology, philosophy and organisational design. As an expert in the meaning of life, Frank has been interviewed for the New York Times, Le Monde, Die Süddeutsche Zeitung and many others.
In addition to his academic work, Frank is also one of the co-founders and current chairman of the board of Filosofian Akatemia Oy, a company with expertise in measuring engagement, motivation and meaningfulness at work and consulting organisations on how to make work-life better. His most recent book is called “A Wonderful Life”.
Exploring the concepts for this session
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What have we learned? Our "Best Bit" takeaways from the Interview
KEY INSIGHTS from the interview FOR OUR INQUIRY
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1. whAT IS GOOD?
Pragmatism and Morality
- “Meliorism” is one key part of pragmatism. It comes from the Latin word ‘meliora’, which means better or getting better. If an optimist thinks the world is the best possible place, and a pessimist thinks the world is the worst possible place, a pragmatist says: it’s not the best, it’s not the worst, and at least there’s something we can do to improve it. So let’s focus on the parts of the world we are able to improve. That’s one key part.
- Evolutionary theory is another important background for pragmatist philosophy, because evolution was quite a new thing in the late 19th century. Darwin had just written his books, and so forth. And then they started thinking that if human beings are the products of evolution, then our thinking also should be the product of evolution. And through that, they realised that thinking itself has probably developed for practical purposes, rather than being a thing removed from the world that is specialised in just contemplating for contemplation’s sake. Our ways of thinking have developed to serve practical purposes.
- When we look at ethics and morality from a pragmatist’s point of view, we don’t have any fundamental truths that we can take for granted, from which we can start. But we have gained some more or less ‘warranted assertions’ through inquiry, through living. So, we have strong intuitions about certain things being morally wrong or right. (…) Moral philosophy quite often is about making our intuitions more systematic, trying to figure out what are the background laws behind this intuition, and so forth. This moral work that philosophers try to do is to sort out messy intuitions about morality into a more coherent system. And then, we can use this system to apply it to individual cases. When we are thinking about the individual case, i.e. whether is it more morally right or morally wrong to do this thing, then all the tools that this inquiry has created can help us to make sure that we take all issues into account when making our practical decisions about doing something or not doing something.
- As regards progress, I would say that there might not be some universal notion of progress, but at least there are various sorts of local progress. (…) We can say that a moral system that more of humanity is ready to accept is better than a system that very few people are ready to accept. For example, the invention of human rights I would count as moral progress. And I call it invention because I don’t think that they were ready-made somewhere, waiting to be discovered. It was philosophical work through which we tried to figure out what are the moral things that people across cultures seem to be value. (…) So there are these local types of progress.
- The easiest example is probably pain and suffering. You wouldn’t find many people who say that those are good things. Most people across the world would agree that causing pain to other people is morally bad unless there are some specific circumstances, but if there’s no specific reason for that, then causing pain is usually considered as bad. So that’s something that we can take as a universal moral truth. And it’s a universal moral truth because it’s part of human nature. Every human being wants to avoid suffering. By studying human nature and trying to figure out what the needs of human beings are, we can arrive at these conclusions about morality, that would be acceptable across the cultures.
- The good life is probably the broadest concept of life. It involves whatever makes a certain life better than another life, based on some individual perfect type, based on a shared perfect type.
- Axiological values are things that are valuable by themselves. (…) When philosophers discuss these axiological values, happiness versus suffering is usually the most shared axiological value. Everybody agrees that that happiness is something people value. If I have to choose between two lives, one of them is full of suffering, and one is full of happiness, I’m gonna choose the one with more happiness. So that’s one way of evaluating the good and goodness of life. How much happiness and how much suffering there is.
- The other axiological value that is often mentioned is morality. If I had to choose between two lives, one of them is morally good, and one morally bad, I might choose the morally good life, even if I know that there’s more suffering in that life. So morality seems to be another way of evaluating the goodness of life.
- Meaningfulness has been argued to be a third way of evaluating the goodness of life. In some situations, people might choose to have lives that are high on meaningfulness instead of lives that are high on happiness. So living a life where you’re able to serve humanity, you know that your actions are mattering to other people, you’re able to do good things to other people, that might have some well-being consequences for you. But even beyond those well-being consequences, you might still feel that this meaningfulness is something that makes life valuable as such.
- There is a distinction between a good life and a meaningful life. One could say that the good life includes all possible axiological values. And when we think about these axiological values, a few key values at least are happiness, morality, and meaning. So these three are often recognised as separate axiological values.
- One way of thinking about purpose is that our lives become more meaningful if we have some goals for the future, which make my present actions, activities and choices somehow worth doing. So future-oriented goals are one aspect. But the other aspect is about contributing to other people. (…) That’s a different thing than just having a purpose or having a goal. So, the notion of “broader purpose” encloses both things, and we can make a distinction between a “purpose as such” and this “contribution as such”.
- Self-determination theory is the idea that there are basic psychological needs, which are connected to our evolutionary nature, which stem from what it “means to be a human being”. When we think about these as needs, then they are subjective experiences, in a sense. (…) But at the same time, we can also look at them as values. In that sense, it is close to the idea of virtue ethics about identifying what is specific about human beings. The self-determination theory recognises three needs and I’d be looking at benevolence or contribution as a fourth need.
- The sense of contribution, being able to do good things to other people, might be good for our own well-being - we might derive good feelings from doing it, but it seems to matter to us beyond the good feelings we get from it. I’m arguing for this ‘dual idea’ of needs. They function as needs, but at the same time we also value them as values as such, and disentangling those two aspects is quite hard sometimes.
- Let’s say I’m a drug salesman, selling some drug for sickness, thinking that humankind may be better because I’m delivering this drug to people. Then after two years, I realise that the scientific research behind the drug was a fraud. It’s no better than a placebo. (…) In that situation, I wouldn’t say: “Oh, no worries, at least I got those two years of good feelings.” I do care. It is not just about the good feeling, but about making a contribution.
- In the World Happiness Report and other rankings, the Nordic countries tend to come out on top of the world every time it’s measured. (…) We investigated this with a couple of colleagues a few years ago. Our main argument is that it’s not about the culture, but it’s mostly about the institutions. The institution seems to be the key thing. So it’s not about the sauna, it’s not about heavy metal, it’s not about hygge, which is this Danish word for cosiness. But it’s more about what we have in the Nordic countries, well-functioning democracy, with relatively extensive welfare benefits, like unemployment benefits, free health care, maternity care, and so forth. (…) I think the state itself cannot produce so much happiness itself, but states can remove many forces of unhappiness.
- This doesn’t mean that in Finland or other Nordic countries there will be more extremely happy people. If you walk the streets of Helsinki and look at the people, you wouldn’t think they are extremely happy. The Finnish people have a melancholic self-image and are not famous for displaying their emotions. But there are fewer extremely unhappy people in the Nordic countries. And that’s mainly due to these institutions.
- One of the biggest happiness gaps, when I look at the data, is between Finland and Russia. The reason why Russia is one of the unhappiest places in Europe is exactly the same. All those things that speak for Nordic countries are lacking there. You know, functioning democracy, free speech, low corruption, and all of these things that are good in Nordic countries are lacking there. And because of that, people are much unhappier in Russia.
- Eudaimonia is a very elusive concept. In psychology, when we measure well-being, the most common way of measuring it is subjective well-being. It includes: positive feelings, negative feelings, and general life satisfaction. (…) Eudaimonia is a concept that captures everything related to well-being, but is not captured by these three things. If you talk about mindfulness, autonomy, and meaning in life, these seem important to well-being, but they’re not part of ‘subjective well-being’. So I think Eudaimonia has developed into a catch-all category of everything connected to well-being which is not subjective well-being. And because of that, different measures of Eudaimonia might include very different things. That’s why they’re not comparable with each other and cannot build any cumulative science.
- The Aristotelian root of Eudaimonia is usually more about a way of living. Because of that, we argue that one key part of Eudaimonia should be about our basic psychological needs. It’s about functioning well in life. So, if well-being is one part of human wellness, then well-doing is another part. We need to identify what experiences we require from our environment that contribute to this broader well-being. I think there’s not going to be one true measure of Eudaimonia in the future, but one key part that should be measured is these basic psychological needs.
- We should probably get rid of the whole concept of Eudaimonia and instead have these more specifically defined (sub-)concepts. So, we might talk about subjective well-being, psychological needs, certain goals or optimism as important parts of well-being. They should be examined on their own merit, rather than competing for which of them is Eudaimonia, and which is not. I would argue that Eudaimonia as a concept is almost doing more harm than good.
2. How to craft GOOD ORGANISATIONS?
What is good work?
- As regards meaningful work, I will say that in its broadest sense, it is about those aspects of work that are valuable, that go beyond the monetary benefit we get from work. Of course, one reason to work is that you’ll get a salary, can pay the bills, put food on the table, and so forth. But at the same time, we do not only work for money. Most people find something else that is valuable in their work. They feel that through the work, they’re able to make the world a better place, help their clients, be part of a community, or they’re able to express themselves and do something they care about. That’s meaningfulness in the broadest sense. What makes work valuable as such, which is not about money. So that’s how I would define meaningful work.
- Purpose has become a buzzword in the business community. (…) Sometimes purpose is defined more narrowly, just some goal in the future that sounds valuable. And sometimes it is this broader purpose which involves making the world a better place. When we talk about purpose in the business context, usually we are referring to the business doing something good for humanity. With regards to how purpose and meaningful work relate to each other, I would say that if an organisation has a high, well-defined and accepted purpose, that’s probably one key part of making work meaningful for the employees. (…) But there might be other things that make work meaningful for me, like the community or self-expression, and so on.
- With regards to organisations, emotions are not often acknowledged. One colleague of mine, who was doing workshops for organisations about emotions, always heard from some people that emotions don’t belong to the organisation, to our work-life. When you come to work, you have to forget about emotions. She always likes to reply that the emotions are already there, whether you acknowledge them or not. If there are human beings, there are going to be emotions, so you better learn how to deal with them rather than think that they don’t exist in the workplace. So that’s one starting point. Acknowledging that there is going to be this emotional layer.
- People are going to have positive and negative emotions, whether you want it or not, but that’s going to be part of the organisation’s reality, part of the way people interact with each other. The emotional dimension is going to be there. And when you have an audience, then you can start doing more to manage that and think about, as a supervisor or leader, what can you do to support these moments (…) and caring connections.
- The opposite of self-management organisations are traditional bureaucratic organisation, which usually have rigid hierarchies. There’s one person at the top, and the top management team, defining what the objectives of the company are. Then they are delegating tasks to people below them. The big goal of the organisation, that the top management has decided, gets translated into more and more narrow tasks. (…) The individual members of the organisation are cogs in the machine, as Weber famously put it. Self-management organisations are the opposite of that in terms of hierarchy, because they tend to be organisations where hierarchical levels are almost absent. There might be top management, but there’s basically no middle management at all.
- One key point to acknowledge about such organisations is that they’re not anarchic organisations. (…) There are two dimensions to organisations: one is this degree of hierarchy; the other is about how much structure there is in the organisation. If you have an organisation which is high on hierarchy and structures, that’s the classic bureaucratic organisation. (…) The opposite of that, low hierarchy and low structure is anarchy. And probably through anarchy, there’s no big task that can be accomplished. Because there’s not enough coherence or coordination between the individual activities to accomplish anything larger. (…) And then there is the organisation, which has a low hierarchy, but still has the structures. That’s a self-managing organisation. They usually have a quite clear structure and clear ways of doing things.
- Reactor is a Finnish IT company that I’ve been studying carefully. It has circa 600 employees and no middle management at all, but autonomous teams. There’s a strong notion of the ‘Reactor way of doing things’. (…) There’s no explicit rule about that. No code book refers to how things are done at Reactor, but people have a certain view of how things are done there. And when somebody does something that doesn’t comply with this implicit image, they intervene.
- One factor is how motivated and competent your employees are. You require e a highly motivated workforce that knows how to do their work. If people are not motivated, then by giving them high levels of autonomy without much oversight might lead to people not doing their work very well. It works better in places where people are professionals and have higher levels of education and commitment to their work. Nurses are a good example. A nurse usually already knows how to treat the patients and has a high motivation to make sure that they get better. So they don’t need so much oversight.
- The other factor is how interdependent the various functions are. In the nursing example, one nursing team doesn’t have to know anything about what the other nursing team is doing. But in a car assembly company, what one team does affects the other team very much. So they need much more coordination with each other. So it’s easier to implement self-management in places where interdependencies are low.
3. HOW TO DEVELOP GOOD LEADERSHIP AND TRANSFORMATION?
System Intelligence
- There are modes of therapy where we are not only treating a person by him/herself. If a teenager has problems, giving therapy only to the teenager might not be as helpful as taking the whole family in. Because it usually has something to do with the dynamics within the family. Treating only one member of the dynamic system is not as helpful as looking at its wholeness. That’s what systems intelligence is about. Realising these systems, of which we are part of, or contributing to systems through our ways of interacting. The first step to becoming more ‘system intelligent’ is to become aware of these systems, becoming aware that it’s not only about the other person, it’s not just about me, but it’s about how we two together create the system.
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Unleash your curiosity and discover new insights
✿ Good Life and Good Society
Further explorations about (the linkage between) reality (ontology), morality (ethics) and meaning of life
Dialogues of Plato
Plato
The Social Construction Of Reality
J.R. Searle
Beyond realism and antirealism: John Dewey and the neopragmatists
David L. Hildebrand
Escape From Freedom
Erich Fromm
The Morality Of Happiness
Julia Annas
Every weekend, in basements and parking lots across the country, young men with good white-collar jobs and absent fathers take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded for as long as they have to.
Chuck Palahniuk
The Power of Pragmatism: Knowledge Production and Social Inquiry
by Jane Wills (Author, Editor), Robert Lake (Author, Editor)
The meaning of life. A reader
by E.D. Klemke and Steven M. Cahn (Editor)
Man's Search For Meaning
by Viktor E. Frankl
Narcissus and goldmund is contrasting the careers of two friends, one of whom goes on the road, tangled in the extremes of life, the other staying in the monastery and struggling to lead a life of spiritual denial.
by Hermann Hesse
Meaning in Life and Why It Matters
by Susan Wolf
Meaning in Life
by Thaddeus Metz
The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
by Bruno Bettelheim
The Myth Of Sisyphus: And Other Essays
by Albert Camus
On Life: A Critical Edition
by Leo Tolstoy
✿ Good Organisations
Further explorations about meaningful work
Systems Intelligence – A New Lens On Human Engagement And Action
Raimo P. Hämäläinen and Esa Saarinen
Meaningful Work
by Andrea Veltman
The Oxford Handbook of Meaningful Work
by Ruth Yeoman (Editor), Catherine Bailey (Editor), Adrian Madden (Editor), Marc Thompson (Editor)
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