Lykkeklinikken

Together with heavily educated (M.D., DMSci., MBA.ex.) and heavenly classy Doc Lund I did a workshop at the European Conference on Positive Psychology yesterday. Not an empty seat, rather we lacked chairs, and we finally promised to upload Claus’ slides pp-conference-june-20101 + a brief position paper from my fierce hand:

You all know about flow so we are going to focus on this figure developed by Hans Henrik Knoop: complexity growth is a matter of balancing differentiation with integration. If you have Curiosity and Teamwork as signature strengths (and it is not very likely) you may have a tendency to call for cohesiveness in the team and escape yourself. As a tramp you leave the camp.

As is said in the bible:

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

• A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
• A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
• A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

What I sometimes see out there, and I’ve been to quite a number of workplaces, is non-audacious people responsible for creativity and innovation and still they find it hard to get an honest idea during their so called careers, maybe because they have Prudence, Authenticity and Fairness among their signature strengths rather than Creativity and Bravery. I also see some people who by way of their toxic, non-daring, trivial pursuit more or less find themselves dying undisturbed at the old hat workplace and unfortunately they may indeed along the way drain their colleagues for lust for co-creating.

So much for positive thinking! I use POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY aggressively for the benefit of psychological and social capital leading to innovation and bottom line…

So I think that the tendency to integration and conventional practice should be counterbalanced by rapid differentiation out of the box hopefully periodically leading to radical emancipation. But the hard part is actually to see the box!

Since 2007 I have seen a growing number of groovy workplaces where it does make a lot of sense to reason in these terms: differentiation versus integration.

For decades the mantra among management consultants and other followers has been: reduction of complexity is what it is all about, but Claus Lund and I think that complexity growth creates added value. So once again and at long last it’s the other way round. Please give Claus a comment (if you request and look through his slideshow) because he is a hardcore anesthesiologist and also has had the guts to introduce positive psychology and psychological capital in his fairly large and successful department. Thus YOU may contribute to reinvent the management limbo…

Fred Luthans pioneered the positive approach in organizational behavior by mapping out positive organizational behavior (POB), with its focus on building human strengths at work rather than only managing weaknesses. Luthans recommended that POB researchers study psychological states that could be validly measured, and that are malleable in terms of interventions in organizations to improve work performance. Luthans proposed that states such as hope, confidence and resiliency meet these criteria.

Backed by research - also in economics - Luthans has even formulated a formula for Return on Investment by such micro-interventions lasting only 2-3 hours. The formula goes like this: ROI equals the number of participants multiplied by their annual wages multiplied by 2 (because we need to finance overhead as well, you know: buildings, furniture, equipment and so forth) multiplied by the correlation coefficient (that through research has been identified as 0.45, which is not impressive, but nevertheless it counts) multiplied by the average tenure (and if you are accountants that may be 8). Through a micro-intervention lasting 2-3 hours that sum which exactly equals the Psychological Capital may be upwardly adjusted by 2 percent, all in all leading to approximately 2 mio. Danish Kroner or roughly 300.000 EURO (with 30 accountants each earning 500.000 DKK; and of course you should deduct all direct costs as well).

So what are you waiting for? I don’t care that much about resistance to change.

Together with Wemind, a Danish company specializing in social software and social media, I introduce one research based intervention per week in large companies, and then the participants may share their experience at virtual platforms like facebook, Ning and WordPress. We have developed special features and functions like meta-tagging the positivity ratio.

One of my other specialties is that I write lengthy (typically 8 pages) and very personal letters for my coachees after only 2 hours of strengths-based coaching with their signature strengths as leitmotives, plus their hopes and best wishes for the future and taking into account perceived challenges and obstacles plus their life situation and lebensraum in general. Recently I did that for the 35 “best and brightest” in a large Danish company with a lot of huge development projects, some of them even amounting to billions of Danish Kroner.

According to Jessica Pryce-Jones’ four years of research:

“When organizations are wondering how to account for every red cent, building happiness at work automatically increases financial value too. Focusing on financial value alone will never build psychological and social capital: focusing on both of these by targeting happiness at work will.”

And that’s groundbreaking news, isn’t it?