Things are a little better in the non-profit sector. Sure, the currency may be different, with a focus on “doing good” but in my experience, compassion is not a high priority. Justice is often a key element, as is fairness, but compassion is often forgotten.

We human animals have been in survival mode for so long, for so many generations, that we are all carrying around bags and bags of trauma. Few of us do not have real childhood traumas, even if most are unaware of them. According to the UK Trauma Council, “One in three children and young people are exposed to at least one potentially traumatic event by the time they are 18.” Add to this the influence of your parents and family, how much *They F*** You Up*, and we are all in a pretty dire state right out of the gate.

After an incredibly bad burnout and several years of being unable to work, I started my therapeutic journey in mid-2016. It was only through this intense and challenging but healing and learning journey over several years that I was finally able to go back to work (in January 2019).

This journey helped me understand just how much trauma was in my life and how trauma begets trauma.

Will Bowen said, “Hurt people hurt people.” We are all hurt, so we hurt others, sometimes intentionally, often unintentionally. I think there is a corollary to this — hurt people get hurt. The hurts we carry around leave us sensitive to specific triggers. This can put us into a defensive mode that causes a repeat of the pattern, leading to more hurt. You may be able to think of some examples of this happening to you.

Why does it matter? We are all professionals. Shouldn’t we “man up” and leave all this stuff at home? Toxic masculinity aside - this is not possible. We are human, and no matter how much we try, it is impossible to separate our traumas or hurts from our day-to-day existence.

Most of us spend most of our time at work (and recovering from it). We do this believing that it will all eventually be worth it - perhaps when we retire or finally make enough money to take a step back. Are we trapped in the promise of the future? I was! Do we have the mental space to realise when we get to that destination? Are we trapped in Stockholm, at the mercy of the prison we have built for ourselves?

Mindfulness aside, how can we make our day-to-day life more enjoyable? How can we make the journey more valuable than the destination? Ultimately, the destination is the same for all of us. Should we be rushing to get there? (If the idea sounded even remotely appealing, I would encourage you to consider finding a good therapist - they do wonders!)

I think it all begins with compassion, starting with compassion for oneself. What if we could create an environment where failure is not an option — not because we must succeed at any cost, but because nothing that happens is considered a failure? What if mistakes are not chastised but used as opportunities to learn from?

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
— Thomas A. Edison

How do we build an environment where innovation, imagination, and creativity thrive? I believe the key here is a sea change to the fundamental attitude and purpose of the organisation. We can create this environment by making the organisation’s primary focus collaboration (with everyone who wants to collaborate) and making compassion the most vital tool of that collaboration.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have deep pockets, so I still need to worry about paying the bills. We also do not (yet) live in a “Star Trek”-like universe where money is no longer critical to society. How will we pay the bills if we focus on something other than commercial viability?

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

In my mind, a good agile team works in this fashion. The team has a shared vision, a goal and everyone is empowered to make choices they feel contributes to progress to the shared goal.

With my recent post on collaboration, I have been thinking about how a concept like this applies within a truly collaborative environment. In the quote, there is clearly a group of people and one of them wants to build a ship. We do not know what the rest of the group desires. In the context of traditional leadership, what the rest of the group wants is importance mainly in the context of understanding how their wants and needs align with those of the ones in leadership.

Within this context, collaboration is often seen as something the team does for the purpose of achieving the goals or the vision set forth by leadership.

Having been through the gauntlet of various levels of company ownership and levels of leadership, the only thing I feel I have ascertained is that I don’t really like any of it. In positions of leadership, the amount of responsibility and pressure is immense and the higher up the ladder you go, the lonelier the job is.

Being a team member with no leadership responsibilities is liberating. There is a great deal of joy in being able to physically and metaphorically shut the computer down at the end of the day and be done with the job. The rest of your life is yours. The downside, on the other hand, is that I disagreed with (at least) half the decisions made. With little power to improve the quality of life of myself or my fellow team members — mainly because ultimately what was important was the bottom line, not quality of life.

Which brings me to the question: how do you build a collaborative environment where the traditional boundaries of leaders and members are dissolved?

I find the first challenge here is finding like minded people. Having the motivation to build a highly collaborative team is only half the challenge if the people in it are trapped in traditional team roles of member or leader — or even worse, manager!

How easy is it to find someone able to see the possibility of a different way of working when we have all been stuck in the rut of us vs them, infinite growth and shareholder value? How easy is it to then learn to put aside our differences, our childhood traumas and our baggage to be able to express our authentic thoughts and desires without triggering our defence mechanisms or letting our emotional baggage leak out? How much does it matter?

Hurt people hurt people, and humanity struggles to cooperate and collaborate mainly because of our hurts — the ones we are unable to heal and recover from. Because our hurts, particularly from childhood, are so strongly seared in us, we see danger when anything close to our hurts presents itself. Like a soldier who ducks and covers when they hear a car backfire — we all go into defensive mode when something familiarly scary comes into our vicinity. Unfortunately for a lot of us, we live in a world full of little triggers — some of which may be so small that they are undetectable — but it impacts our mood and our ability to reason.

We live in the belief that what is good for “the machine,” is good for the individual - be it capitalism, the government, or society. What if we worked on the basis of the opposite.

Not all those who wander are lost.
— J. R. R. Tolkien