Introduction
In his new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, social scientist Jonathan Haidt argues that growing up with smartphones has had a devastating impact on Gen Z. It has spiked levels of anxiety and depression. It has increased feelings of loneliness and friendlessness. It has made people more risk averse and led to global educational declines in maths, reading and science [1].
He makes the case for banning the use of smartphones in schools and not permitting social media use before the age of sixteen.
But it’s not just teenagers who are hooked on their smartphones. In a 2022 Gallup poll, nearly 60% of Americans said they used their phones too often [2]. Meanwhile, people in Ireland spend an average of 4.5 hours on their phone a day [3]. Only 10% of that time is spent talking to someone in a phone conversation. The rest is given over to scrolling.
A lot of that scrolling takes place at work.
Smartphones in the workplace
A recent survey by Screen Education showed that employees waste, on average, more than two hours per work day using their phones. The average person checks their phone 150 times a day, with studies showing that the mere presence of a smartphone reduces our cognitive ability by taking attention away from other tasks [4].
A great deal has been written about how technology has brought the workplace into our personal lives. But an underrated topic of discussion is how it has also brought our personal lives into the workplace. For example, a recent Qualtrics and Google study found that 29% of employees say it is difficult to resist checking personal notifications while at work [5]. A lot of those personal interactions take place on phones.
The same study found that 80% of consumers use only one phone, and about half use that phone for both their personal and work life [6]. It’s hardly a surprise that people are struggling to separate the professional from the personal when they use the same device to govern both. It’s especially unsurprising given we are growing evermore reliant on our smartphones for work activity.
A recent survey on behalf of Samsung Ireland by Opinion Matters found that almost 70% of Irish people rely on their smartphone for work [7]. Almost a third said they needed their phone in order to be productive.
Unsurprisingly, given Haidt’s findings, this level of phone use is especially pronounced amongst young people. 76% of millennials were found to rely on their phones to do their jobs, with 26% saying they checked on their devices “consistently” [8].
Almost half the respondents said they would be lost without their devices. This points to a core issue regarding smartphones: their addictive nature.
Addictive symptoms and no flow
In their article ‘Smartphone addiction, daily interruptions and self-reported productivity’, Duke and Montag write that: “Though not an official diagnosis, several researchers have demonstrated how classic addiction symptomology may be applicable in the context of smartphone overuse, including loss of control (e.g. distortion of time spent on the phone), preoccupation with the smartphone, withdrawal symptoms and negative effects on our social and work lives.” [9]
The fidgety, compulsive aspect of our relationship with our phone is a problem not just because of the time spent on our phone. It also affects how we’re working when not on our phone, preventing us from achieving a “flow” state.
Flow, as coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book of the same name, refers to a state in which we are fully absorbed by an activity, forgetting about space and time, whilst being very productive. It’s that feeling of disappearing into an activity and re-emerging some time later, surprised to learn how much time has passed.
Even small interruptions have been shown to take one out of a flow state. Interruptions as brief as 2.8 seconds were found to disrupt participants’ flow of concentration and lead to increased errors on a sequence-based cognitive task [10]. Meanwhile, it’s been shown that it takes an average of 23 minutes to get back to a task after experiencing an interruption [11]. Checking your phone or simply seeing it flash or vibrate can be enough to ruin a moment of focus. What Duke and Montag term the “checking habit” is so ingrained in many of us that even without receiving a message we will feel an impulse to reach for our device. This is especially true if it’s in sight. The presence of a phone has been found to distract us even if the phone is turned off [12].
Participants in Duke and Montag’s research admitted to spending more time on their smartphone while at work than they felt was optimal [13]. In other words, they were aware of the negative effects but continued all the same. It’s a relatable shortcoming, and yet another similarity between the addict mindset and that of the average smartphone user. Worse still, research has shown that much of our phone checking is done unconsciously and that there is a significant gap between how much we think we’re checking our phone and how much we really are [14].
Put more simply: We know our smartphone use is negatively affecting us. We think we use our phones too much. We are actually using them even more than we think.
Smartphones are the ultimate office distraction –– which is why they are a problem for employers. The average employee loses 720 work hours due to distraction every year [15]. Those lost hours are felt in profits. As such, it’s no surprise that businesses have tried to fix the problem.
Battling the smartphone
As with Haidt’s recommendations for schools, some businesses have attempted to ban the use of smartphones in the workplace. Amazon warehouse employees were required to leave their phones at home or in their vehicle before stepping inside the premises, although that ban has subsequently been revoked [16]. Meanwhile, a 2022 report noted that one-fifth of companies based in Berlin implemented some form of smartphone ban [17].
In some workplaces, phones are banned not for reasons of productivity but security. Having some form of ban in place is common practice in data centres, manufacturing plants, research and development labs, and executive conference rooms. This is to prevent potential corporate espionage by way of the remote hijacking of smartphone cameras and microphones. Not all of these bans will be hard bans –– i.e. regulation against bringing them into the premises. Some will be as simple as signs prohibiting use in certain areas, with other designated use areas available.
The problem with an outright ban on phones in the workplace is that, unlike with children in schools, employees are grown adults capable of making their own choices. Many would baulk at an employer trying to dictate whether or not they could use their phone at work, seeing it as draconian overreach.
On top of that, evidence suggests bans don’t work. In fact, they can make the situation worse.
The case for phones
In their study in the journal Internet Research, Whelan and Turel found that the revoking of a smartphone ban made no impact on employee productivity. However, employees who were banned from using their phone at work suffered increased stress and greater levels of work-life conflict [18].
This is backed up by the findings of a new study conducted by the University of Galway and the University of Melbourne [19]. It found that personal use of smartphones in the workplace can reduce stress and help employees achieve a better work/life balance. It also found moderate mobile phone usage to have no discernible impact on employee performance.
Employees who were able to use their phone reported being able to help with family issues during the day, helping to reduce pressure on their partner. The ability to handle their personal communications throughout the day also meant that they were not inundated with a day’s worth of messages the second they left work and so could avoid being suddenly overwhelmed.
Writing in Forbes, Tali Rapaport, co-founder of employer branding and candidate engagement platform Puck, argues that rather than trying to reduce employees’ time on phones, employers should be trying to find ways to introduce mobile-friendly communication practices. “If employers want an engaged pool of candidates and existing employees,” she writes, “they need to meet them where they’re at –– on their phones.” [20]
She goes on to argue that with staff shortages a growing problem, and the retention of quality talent a priority for most businesses, it is essential that companies take steps to move towards employee ideals. “The companies that act now to implement mobile-friendly communication practices will be better able to address staffing shortages with quality talent and reduce attrition of talented employees. A company that doesn’t communicate in a way that resonates well with the workforce will fall behind a competitor that does.”
Other solutions
There’s no one right answer to managing our relationships with smartphones, be it in the office or in our personal lives. Some common solutions are to take one night a week away from technology, as advocated by Laura Mae Martin, Google’s executive productivity adviser [21]. If that’s not possible, maybe try to set 15-minute phone-free breaks in your day. You could take a walk or go to grab a coffee without it. “Anything you can do to create an environment that makes it as easy as possible to distance yourself from the phone will be helpful,” said James A. Roberts, an expert on consumer behaviour at Baylor University and author of ‘Too Much of a Good Thing: Are You Addicted to Your Smartphone?’ [22]
Mindfulness has also been shown to help. Practising meditation improves impulse control and executive function, as well as helping to counter shrinking attention spans. Developing greater awareness can help reign in bad habits [23]. As suggests Richard J. Davidson, founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: “When you become aware of the urge [to grab your phone], simply ask yourself, ‘Do I really need to do this right now?’” [24]
70% of employees say they would prefer greater separation between their work and personal life on their phones [25]. That would suggest that whatever we’re doing currently isn’t working.
In an article in The Atlantic, Haidt includes a quote from ‘Walden’, Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 reflection on simple living. “The cost of a thing is the amount of…life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
The data would suggest that we’re currently exchanging too much of our lives –– at work and at home –– for time on our phone. It could have a significant cost.
More on Productivity
How to focus and become indistractable with Nir Eyal – Podcast
Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time
How Much Should You be Working?
More on Mindfulness
Mindfulness, Meditation and Compassion in the Workplace and in Life with Scott Shute – Podcast
Schopenhauer and the Workplace
Sources
[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/393785/americans-close-wary-bond-smartphone.aspx
[5] https://www.qualtrics.com/blog/phones-affect-work-life-balance/
[6] https://www.qualtrics.com/blog/phones-affect-work-life-balance/
[9] Duke É, Montag C. Smartphone addiction, daily interruptions and self-reported productivity. Addict Behav Rep. 2017 Jul 19;6:90-95. doi: 10.1016/j.abrep.2017.07.002. PMID: 29450241; PMCID: PMC5800562.
[10] Duke É, Montag C. Smartphone addiction, daily interruptions and self-reported productivity. Addict Behav Rep. 2017 Jul 19;6:90-95. doi: 10.1016/j.abrep.2017.07.002. PMID: 29450241; PMCID: PMC5800562.
[12] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/home-internet-landline-amazon-smartphone/676070/
[13] Duke É, Montag C. Smartphone addiction, daily interruptions and self-reported productivity. Addict Behav Rep. 2017 Jul 19;6:90-95. doi: 10.1016/j.abrep.2017.07.002. PMID: 29450241; PMCID: PMC5800562.
[14] Duke É, Montag C. Smartphone addiction, daily interruptions and self-reported productivity. Addict Behav Rep. 2017 Jul 19;6:90-95. doi: 10.1016/j.abrep.2017.07.002. PMID: 29450241; PMCID: PMC5800562.
[17] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10683-021-09715-w
[20]
[21] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/well/social-media-phone-addiction.html
[22] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/well/social-media-phone-addiction.html
[24] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/well/social-media-phone-addiction.html
[25] https://www.qualtrics.com/blog/phones-affect-work-life-balance/
Introduction
The term ‘burnout’ was originally coined by the American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger in the 1970s [1]. Although initially its use was exclusively reserved for those in “helping” professions such as doctors and nurses, today burnout’s grip does not discriminate by profession; it extends far and wide. Today’s workforce is twice as likely to report that they are “always exhausted” than they were twenty years ago [2]. Meanwhile, a 2023 survey of US workers reported that 59% were experiencing burnout, of which 71% were Gen Z and 65% millennials [3]. This is a problem in the ascendency.
In 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially classified burnout as a medical diagnosis, including the condition in the International Classification of Diseases, defining it as “a syndrome conceptualised as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” [4]
Burnout is generally easy to notice. Employees suffering from it are likely to show a lack of energy, sometimes to the point of exhaustion, a newfound sense of negativity and cynicism for their work, and a loss of productivity and/or drop in performance levels. In terms of the immediate impact on the workplace, employees experiencing burnout are 63% more likely to take a sick day, 23% more likely to visit the emergency room, and more than twice as likely to be actively seeking a different job. [5]
Why are we burned out?
Burnout is not new, but its pervasiveness is. That’s likely because its causes are accentuated by the work structures of modern life. According to 2022 survey data from the recruiting firm Zippia, 86% of fully remote workers experience some degree of burnout in their job, as opposed to 81% among hybrid workers, and 70% of those working fully in person [6]. Given remote forms of working were only recently normalised, that could be a contributory factor in burnout’s rise. A more obvious reason would be technological advancements. The majority of us now have email on our phone and a decent-quality laptop or computer at home. That has allowed work to spill out well past traditional working hours into evenings and weekends. There is no off switch or escape hatch.
It’s common to try to fight burnout with a quick holiday, rest day, or temporary lessening of hours, but any changes need to be more fundamental and long-term. Short-term approaches amount to little more than sticking plasters on a shattered bone. Burnout is a problem that develops over time; it can only be fixed with time too. If the tank is empty, simply driving slower isn’t going to fill it up again.
Not only do holidays not necessarily fix the problem of burnout, they can actually compound it. A recent MyBioSource survey of over one thousand US workers found that 50% of employees said taking time off left them feeling drained for at least a week upon return. Meanwhile, 44% reported experiencing exhaustion and 32% increased anxiety when returning to work after a break [7]. Such problems are going to be especially resonant if staff have to overburden themselves catching up either after or before their rest –– not only will the catch-up period be stressful, but the knowledge that the work is piling up while they’re away will impair their time off.
Witnessing the proliferation of burnout in workers, a number of businesses have taken to addressing the problem through ‘wellness days’ or ‘mental health days’, in which staff can take a day off every now and again to focus on their well-being. Well-meaning as this may be, it is an insufficient solution to a problem that’s roots run far deeper and are unlikely to be mended by a single day of rest. As Jonathan Malesic, author of The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives, writes in The Atlantic: “We might think of a mental-health day as a form of workplace avoidance dressed in the language of self-care.” [8]
All that is not to say that there is no use taking breaks. A 2014 study found that doctors in Japan who had two to four days off a month were more than three times more likely to suffer from burnout than those who had eight or more days off. But to truly address burnout one needs to make fundamental changes to work structures, not simply take a brief break before returning to the exact same approach that caused the problems in the first place.
The need for meaning
It can be easy to think burnout boils down to a simple misalignment between work and rest –– work too many hours without sufficient rest and you will be burned out; rest more and you will be fixed. But it’s more complicated than that. In fact, research shows that the number of hours one works is not the principal cause of burnout. There is something more innately human at play.
“Misalignment burnout happens when we constantly engage with environments and in activities that go against our innermost values and beliefs, leading to a disconnect between our true selves and professional identity,” writes Mark Travers, Ph.D. in Forbes. [9]
Working a job that we feel offers value to the world or that we feel we offer value to is key to avoiding burnout and having a healthy relationship with our work more generally. A 2015 study published in the Journal of Managerial Psychology found that when employees feel like they fit well with their organisation and their specific role, they’re less likely to experience burnout [10]. When it comes to overall well-being, the quality of one’s work experience has been found to be up to three times more important than the number of hours worked [11].
Also vital to having a thriving sense of professional value is a level of autonomy and support –– are we trusted to do the work? Is there someone there to help us on the difficult days? In his book Dying for a Paycheck, Jeffrey Pfeffer writes of workplace autonomy: “If through their actions people cannot predictably and significantly affect what happens to them, they are going to stop trying. Why expend effort when the results of that effort are uncontrollable, rendering the effort fruitless?” [12]
In terms of support, Harvard Business Review reports that there is a significant correlation between feeling lonely and work exhaustion [13]. Bill Hudenko, Ph.D., global head of mental health at the digital care company K Health, points out that “burnout is not an individual failing, rather it is a systemic issue that stems from a disconnect between expectations of workers and the leadership or conditions of the workplace.” [14]
The role of managers
Steve Salee, Founder and CEO of Wildfire Strategies, writes in Forbes that too often the burnout diagnosis puts the onus on employees to fix themselves. They are told to meditate, exercise or take some time off. In other words, to sort themselves out. Salee prefers a different term for this dismissive attitude employers can show towards their workers: moral toxicity.
Moral toxicity “describes the cumulative experience of being disregarded, unprotected, undervalued or dehumanised by an employer. It’s a potent cocktail of disrespect, injustice and emotional erosion that, over time, can poison the entire workplace culture,” he writes. He says that we saw a prime example of moral toxicity at play during the pandemic in the way exhausted healthcare workers were treated. To describe what those workers were going through as burnout, he says, “ignores the deeper ethical breach at play.” [15]
Whether staff are suffering from burnout or moral toxicity, employers have a duty of care to their workers. A Gallup study found that employees who felt cared for by their manager were 70% less likely to experience burnout. [16]
Dr Steven E. Pratt, M.D., senior medical director at Magellan Healthcare, suggests a number of policies and strategies that employers can put in place to prioritise employee care [17]. These include encouraging frequent breaks, offering healthy food options in workplace dining areas, providing education on positive health habits, and encouraging open dialogue about stressors and ways to manage stress.
Every individual’s relationship with work is different. Some will burn out easier than others. Good management involves a tailoring of approach according to how staff are likely to respond. Too often managers create an achievement-at-all-costs atmosphere and act as if any negative fallout employees feel is a result of their individual weakness rather than any systemic problem.
As Christina Maslach, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley and one of the foremost burnout researchers in the United States, puts it: “The phrase ‘If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen’—it’s sort of saying: The kitchen is what it is, and you’re going to have to figure out how to deal with it, without ever saying, really, ‘Does the kitchen have to be that hot?’” [18]
There are of course steps individuals can take to improve their own sense of well-being and to counteract burnout –– ideally before it manifests, rather than relying strictly on reactionary measures. Yoga, meditation, exercise, a regular sleep schedule and having a social life outside of work are all suggested, as well as being disciplined in cutting off work hours at a reasonable time, especially difficult in the age of remote working.
And if a job proves too demanding or so unfulfilling that you feel yourself draining, it could be a sign that it’s time to move on to ventures new. As the Dalai Lama advises, “If you feel ‘burnout’ setting in, if you feel demoralised and exhausted, it is best, for the sake of everyone, to withdraw and restore yourself.” [19]
More on Burnout
The Million-Dollar Impact of Burnout & Busyness Culture
Personal Leadership Through a Performance Mindset with Laura Piccardi – Podcast
Rethinking the Workplace with Prof. Deirdre O’Shea – Podcast
Sources
[1] https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1974.tb00706.x
[2] https://hbr.org/2017/06/burnout-at-work-isnt-just-about-exhaustion-its-also-about-loneliness
[8] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/11/workplace-burnout-mental-health-days/672111/
[10] https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JMP-12-2012-0404/full/html
[12] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/03/how-tell-if-you-have-burnout/618250/
[13] https://hbr.org/2017/06/burnout-at-work-isnt-just-about-exhaustion-its-also-about-loneliness
[14] https://www.forbes.com/health/mind/signs-of-work-burnout/
[16] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/237059/employee-burnout-part-main-causes.aspx
[17] https://www.forbes.com/health/mind/signs-of-work-burnout/
[18] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/03/how-tell-if-you-have-burnout/618250/
Introduction
Through the late-nineties and early-noughties, neoliberal-optimists-in-chief bristled with confidence that they could steer the world toward a more enlightened, mutually tolerant and co-dependent global order. Such hopes proved naive; the end of history was just the beginning.
The last ten years have been marred by rising populism, the pandemic, and bloody conflicts, the current wars in Ukraine and the Middle East the most notable examples. Such global turbulence affects businesses – and leaders. As David S. Lee of the Hong Kong University Business School surmises, “Most CEOs came of age during a period of globalisation, when free markets and trade were assumed to be net goods. But the ground has shifted” [1].
Leaders – even experienced leaders – have not had to deal with the level (and variety) of problems currently facing the world. On top of the aforementioned conflicts and political unrest, which impact everything from supply chains to employee morale, there have been shifts in the level of engagement businesses are expected to make regarding social issues. Not engaging, or engaging in the wrong way, can quickly prove damaging, maybe even fatal, as many businesses have found out the hard way.
On top of that, attitudes to work have shifted. Millennial and Gen Z workers have values and expectations that differ drastically from their Gen X and Boomer colleagues. These shifts in working values were only exacerbated by the pandemic, in which the in-office 9-5 ceased to be part and parcel of the working experience. In swathes, employees began asking themselves whether they were truly satisfied with their lot. The answer came in the form of the Great Resignation and quiet quitting; people wanted more.
AI poses greater challenges still. How soon will the technology become sufficiently sophisticated to start displacing human workforces on a large scale? How will that overhaul be handled, by businesses and governments? And how will the human animal, conditioned over millennia to find worth and meaning through work, react to no longer being needed?
It is the job of great leaders to meet these challenges.
McKinsey predicts that by 2027, 75% of the companies listed on the S&P 500 will have disappeared [2]. To be one of the 25%, leaders need to face these issues head on, as well as putting structures in place to ensure they’re as prepared as they can be for future unknowns.
Where do you work?
In the wake of the war in the Middle East, Houthi militants launched attacks on shipping vessels in the Red Sea. The attacks caused enormous disruption, prompting a collective shift in supply chain routes to avoid the area, with the requisite delays in shipping timelines and ramped up costs an inevitable result.
This follows on from the Ever Given fiasco of 2021, in which one of the world’s largest shipping vessels found itself farcically stuck in the Suez Canal, blocking the route off to other suppliers for a matter of six days. Add to that the fallout from Covid and you have a clear reminder that existing supply chains are at the mercy of the world around them. And these problems are coming thick and fast.
As Nitin Nohria, the former dean of Harvard Business School, writes of what he refers to as leadership’s ‘new zeitgeist’, “Leaders can no longer assume that trouble may strike once every three or four years and be managed by outside crisis consultants. Instead, companies must prepare for a steady stream of upheavals—and hone their in-house skills for dealing with them” [3].
A growing subset of firms are looking to capitalise on increasing demand from companies for advice on how to navigate a world in turmoil. In October of 2023, Goldman Sachs set up an institute to analyse geopolitics and technology. Prior to that, Lazard and The McKinsey Global Institute set up similar ventures. Whether it’s done in house or managed by external consultants, the consensus is that these problems aren’t going away. Solutions are needed.
As a result of the barrage of incidents affecting supply chains, a number of companies are looking to pivot their supply bases to less politically challenging countries in what is sometimes known as “friend-shoring”. Others are choosing to move their supply chains to their home nations. Each of these moves comes with its own regulatory challenges and periods of adjustment. For companies choosing to stick to the area of turbulence, Ziad Haider, McKinsey’s global director of geopolitical risk, notes that they “need to use a lot more care and diligence to make sure there isn’t, for example, forced labour involved in that supply chain” [4].
There are no easy options. Do you stay or do you go? Stick or twist? Do you rely on instinct to decide or trust in third-party consultants? Do you set up your own internal consultancy, seeing it a necessary investment in what are proving to be difficult times? All of these considerations and more fall to leaders, who are expected to have clear answers to complex questions.
Reputational risk
In the past, the answer the CEO gave would likely have been based on one consideration only: which option best serves our bottom line? Nowadays, other factors are at play. Namely, reputational ones.
Haider raises the question modern leaders must confront: How do you maintain a global footprint but be ready to answer the question about why you are in that problematic market?
“The bar for explaining where you are and why you’re there has gone up from external stakeholders, be it media or parliament, as well as internally, from colleagues. That’s something companies are having to balance. What you say in one market very quickly shows up in the other market, so you can’t get away with shading your messaging too much, either,” he explains [5].
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, companies were quick to distance themselves from the country. Admittedly, that was partly for legal reasons, with heavy sanctions dealt Russia’s way. But the companies also acted with awareness that Russia had become a persona-non-grata; to do business with them would have been reputationally ruinous.
But what about in cases where there’s less consensus as to the villain of the story? Critics are quick to point to double standards in the way businesses who were quick to pull out of Russia are fine to do business with Saudi Arabia, for example, who waged a similarly destructive war in Yemen and brutally executed an American journalist. Finding a clear position amongst nuanced global standings is difficult – also exemplified by the inconsistency of the West’s approach to China over these past decades and the difficulty businesses are having responding to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The death of the global chief executive
In the Financial Times, fellow at the American Enterprise Institute think-tank Elisabeth Braw writes that “the era of borderless enterprise may be past. Geopolitical tensions are rising, leaving business in the line of fire. Suddenly companies’, and executives’, nationalities matter again” [6].
Braw cites the California-based space transportation start-up Momentus, valued at $1.2bn, that parted ways with its Russian CEO and co-founder Mikhail Kokorich over US national security concerns.
“The fact that some countries aren’t getting along doesn’t mean businesses should discriminate against certain nationalities,” Braw writes. “But it does mean that they should get used to a reality in which they can be attacked as country proxies.”
To be from the “wrong” country can lead to one having their home nation’s ideologies thrust upon them by association. As with supply chains, companies are looking at which countries – and whether consciously or not, which people from those countries – are worth the hassle. It’s unlikely to take the form of outright discrimination. Rather, if deciding between a homegrown hire or someone who might require additional vetting, companies will default to the easy option. It is, of course, horrifically unfair for someone’s career prospects to be potentially hampered by their place of birth. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
“We’re seeing that nationality is starting to matter a lot more,” says Andrew Grant, a senior partner at McKinsey. “Leaders must work to hold their organisation together when many of their employees are subject to much more nationalistic forces than they used to be. The leaders we speak and engage with are quite concerned about how to nurture a global culture in a world that is nowhere near as sympathetic as it used to be” [7].
What can leaders do now?
For all the creeping nationalism in enterprise, Grant reminds us that there’s no right answer to complex geopolitical pain points.
“No one has a monopoly on the right perspective. It’s really important for global companies to understand that these are very three-dimensional problems that they should view from a truly global, not just national, lens. The right stance is rarely black and white. And even if it’s black and white today, it may not be black and white tomorrow” [8].
In order to meet the times head on, Lisa Pollina, a global financial services executive and member of the Board of the Atlantic Council of the United States and the Council on Foreign Relations, says leaders must find solutions that (1) protect employees (2) weigh the impact on stakeholders (3) safeguard the bottom line (4) prioritise the organisation’s well-being beyond just the profit model [9].
She suggests boards meet frequently to monitor ongoing events, which move at a pace, and regularly review both past decisions and the evolving political landscape.
Haider says boards should take a granular approach. “Every month, the board needs to look at the top five markets of geopolitical concern and create a clear game plan about what will be done to manage those risks—and that starts with having a common set of facts” [10].
This last point is crucial. Coming up with a productive pandemic strategy would have been impossible for a board whose members couldn’t agree on whether or not the disease was real. Basic facts must be established and agreed upon before any substantive progress can be made.
Leaders must also provide employees with a clear direction of travel. José Luís González Rodriguez, a partner at ActionCOACH in Spain, says that the most effective way to align on facts and ensure everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet is to make use of data.
“In my experience, a significant percentage of business decisions are made without the necessary information, simply because the company data is not structured and up-to-date,” he says. “No one would think of driving a vehicle without looking at the dashboard, and similarly, we should not run companies without one. This is especially relevant in the digital age, where data has become the most relevant asset in every industry” [11].
More than anything, leaders will need to be adaptive. Things change quickly, both in global circumstances and in-vogue attitudes. A good leader will be tuned in to the prevailing winds of the time and have a nose for future trends too. They will adapt to the circumstances around them as well as to the feelings of their staff, with an empathetic approach that brings the best out of their multi-generational teams, whose values likely differ worker-to-worker. Equity, work-life balance and flexible work culture will all need to be factored in amongst the conflicts of the day.
Leaders today face a more diverse set of problems than ever before. Those that can navigate those tricky waters unscathed will be in the minority – and rewarded all the more for it.
More on the Future of Leadership
Leadership in Focus: Foundations and the Path Forward
Mastering Change and Complexity: Strategic Leadership in an Uncertain Business World
Embracing Ambiguity: Leadership in the Liminal Space
Modern Skills for a Modern Boardroom: A New Look at Leadership
Leadership Lessons from Obama and Other US Presidents – Podcast
Sources
[1] https://www.cutter.com/event/leading-era-geopolitical-turmoil
[3] https://hbr.org/2022/07/as-the-world-shifts-so-should-leaders
[6] https://www.ft.com/content/4635c387-1ecf-41ce-82f4-592691dfc894
Introduction
More than one-quarter of the workers in G7 countries will be 55 or older by 2031 [1]. In the US, that figure will be reached by 2028 [2], with the number of workers over fifty having increased by 80% in the last 20 years and the number of over-65s having tripled [3]. In the UK, there are now 185% more over-65s in the workforce than there were in 1992 [4]. Meanwhile, the UN projects the number of working-age people in South Korea and Italy will decrease by 13 million and 10 million by 2050 [5]. The number of working-age residents in China could shrink by 200 million in the same timeframe [6].
These changes are profound. Demographic shifts will drastically alter countries’ global standing and socio-economic performance, while forcing a rethink on domestic policies regarding pensions and immigration. Life in old age will soon look very different to how it does today. People will be working deep into their sixties, seventies, maybe even eighties. This will have a colossal impact on businesses.
An ageing workforce
Global talent shortages are projected to lead to more than 85 million unfilled jobs by 2030. This will result in annual revenue losses of roughly $8.5 trillion [7]. One way to fill these vacancies is to break from the traditional mould of generally hiring graduates or younger workers by instead hiring older employees. Bain & Company estimates that approximately 150 million jobs globally will need to shift to workers 55 and older by the end of the decade [8].
Despite the necessity of these changes, take-up is slow. In Forbes, Sheila Callaham, executive director and Board Chair for the Age Equity Alliance,notes that “talent management processes such as recruiting, hiring, promoting and retaining tend to exclude individuals under 24 or over 40. The result is a 16-year criterion for talent” [9].
Part of the problem is age discrimination. A recent AARP poll reported that 78% of older workers said they had seen or experienced age discrimination in the workplace, the highest level since AARP began tracking the question in 2003 [10]. A recent SHRM survey backs these findings up [11]. It found that 26% of workers aged 50 and older said they’d been the target of age-related remarks in the previous six months, with 72% of that grouping saying the experience made them feel like quitting their job. Meanwhile, US census data from 2022 showed that the only group in the country to experience an increase in poverty was Americans aged 65 and older [12].
A lot of the discrimination against older people in the workplace is bred from baseless preconceptions regarding performance. A pre-pandemic report for the British Medical Association revealed that while parts of the brain that deal with things like working memory may degrade in middle age, overall age-related cognitive decline is not typically pronounced until you reach at least 70, and only 5% of people over 65 show signs of cognitive impairment [13].
Regarding productivity, the report concluded that: “The main finding is that healthy older people perform equally as well as their younger counterparts” [14]. In other words, not only is discrimination against older workers morally wrong, it is based on a false premise.
In fact, in some regards, older workers are preferable to their younger counterparts. A 2023 Wall Street Journal-NORC survey of Americans’ values found that three-quarters of over-65s said hard work was very important to them personally, compared to just 61% of those in the 18-29 age bracket [15].
“It makes great business sense to hire experienced workers,” said Heather Tinsley-Fix, senior adviser for employer engagement at the AARP, speaking to the Wall Street Journal. “More companies are also recognizing the need to include age in their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts” [16].
Robert Sheen, founder and CEO of Trusaic, a technology company focused on pay equity, DEI and healthcare, writes in Forbes that employers “report that older workers tend to have superior problem-solving and interpersonal communication skills, possess a strong work ethic, offer a deep understanding of customer service and bring a larger perspective to bear on their work and that of their teammates –– all of which complement the skills that younger workers bring to the table” [17].
This final point is crucial. A multigenerational office dynamic leaves companies best placed to succeed, with older employees working in tandem with younger ones, each bringing their specific skills to the table while learning off one another. And for all the talk of differences between the generations, their values have actually been found to co-align.
The Institute for Employment Studies and the Centre for Ageing Better found that older workers desire “meaningful and intellectually stimulating work, job security and opportunities for learning, mentoring and career progression” [18]. Flexibility and being part of an organisation whose values they identify with were also found to be pivotal. These align entirely with the oft-reported on values of Gen Z workers, whom many commentators like to treat as though they were an entirely separate species.
It’s no wonder, then, that the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that age-diverse firms have lower staff turnover and higher productivity rates than their benchmark peers [19].
The cost of discrimination
The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) reportedly resolved more than 12,000 age-related discrimination cases in the 2022 fiscal year, more than the 13,000 cases in 2021 and over 15,000 in 2020 [20]. Some of the payouts in these settlements ran into the millions. One would hope workplaces would be disincentivised from indulging in age-based discrimination for the right reasons, such as they want equality or recognise that older workers have a great deal to offer. But if not, maybe the fact that such discriminations would be financially damaging, not to mention reputationally ruinous, will prove sufficient.
An absence of preparation
An AARP global survey of employers found that around 4% had implemented programs to integrate older workers into their talent systems, with slightly more than 25% saying they were “very likely” to explore doing so in the future [21]. Only 6% were found to have policies in place related to unbiased recruiting processes.
According to the Centre for Ageing Better, only one in five employers are discussing the ageing workforce strategically and nearly a quarter admit they are unprepared for the growing number of older workers [22].
Clearly then, in spite of the stark need for older workers, businesses are not sufficiently prepared for the transition that is soon to take place in the workforce.
Sheila Callaham writes that, “It’s crucial for company leaders to understand age demographics, just as it is to understand other vital demographic figures. That means dissecting age demographics according to the talent pool, hires, development, promotion and retention” [23].
And yet further AARP research revealed just 42% of companies provide their managers with the training and support necessary to effectively manage a multigenerational workforce, while only 39% focus on how to avoid age discrimination in recruitment or hiring, and 38% focus on how to avoid age discrimination in providing access to training opportunities [24].
Managers must do more. An older workforce is a certainty. There’s no excuse for not making the necessary preparations now in order to achieve success in the future. One technique that has been found to work is implementing programmes of lifelong learning. As noted earlier, older workers are not dissimilar from their Gen Z counterparts in their desire to keep learning and improving, and to work for companies that have a structure in place that allows them to grow rather than stagnate. If people are going to be working longer, the last thing they want is to feel stuck.
A 2023 Transamerica Institute report backed up the notion that lifelong learning opportunities are valued by older workers and are a proven method for attracting and retaining them [25]. That said, the same report revealed that only 28% of the nearly 1,900 employers surveyed offer specific training to address generational differences and help prevent age discrimination. There is much more work to do.
Managing an ageing workforce
Ageing populations are affecting the entire world and could lead to a total restructuring of the global order. With widespread job shortages and people working later and later into their lives, it only makes sense for firms to start hiring older workers to plug the gaps. Not only do they offer experience and a strong work ethic but they can help younger workers to thrive. For too long, older workers have been at the mercy of baseless discrimination. Companies that are serious about facing the new demographics of the future will need to show they are serious about providing a discrimination-free work environment that offers lifelong learning opportunities in order to entice and retain older workers. Those that don’t will feel the demographic shifts first and hardest, and may never recover.
More on Diversity & Inclusion
Diversity and Conflict for a Plural Workforce
The Evolution of Great CEO Leadership
Sources
[1] https://www.bain.com/insights/better-with-age-the-rising-importance-of-older-workers/
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/16/world/world-demographics.html
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/16/world/world-demographics.html
[7] https://www.kornferry.com/insights/this-week-in-leadership/talent-crunch-future-of-work
[8] https://www.bain.com/insights/better-with-age-the-rising-importance-of-older-workers/
[11] https://www.shrm.org/about/press-room/new-shrm-research-details-age-discrimination-workplace
[13] https://ft.pressreader.com/1389/20230529/281887302684607
[14] https://ft.pressreader.com/1389/20230529/281887302684607
[15] https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-older-workers-work-harder-some-bosses-think-so-c4088c7d
[16] https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-older-workers-work-harder-some-bosses-think-so-c4088c7d
[18] https://ageing-better.org.uk/sites/default/files/2017-12/What-do-older-workers-value.pdf
[19] https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/15f92878-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/15f92878-en
[22] https://ageing-better.org.uk/news/uk-employers-unprepared-ageing-workforce
Introduction
A recent CNBC poll found that 58% of US citizens believe it’s inappropriate for companies to take a stance on social issues [1]. The number is 48% for those aged 18-34. Crucially only 43% said they felt it was appropriate for companies to take a stance. That’s down from 62% in 2018 and 70% in 2019. In other words, public attitudes are shifting.
A separate Gallup and Bentley University poll found different numbers showing the same trend. Pollsters found that 41% of Americans felt businesses should generally take a stand on current events, down from 48% one year prior. Fewer than 30% of respondents felt that brands should weigh in on international conflicts [2].
This last figure is striking, and given current global events hints that this trend will continue. Over the past decade, it’s become not just acceptable but expected that major brands will weigh in on the issue of the day. From Black Lives Matter to #MeToo through issues around gender identity and abortion, consumers wanted to know they were not giving their hard-earned cash to enterprises they deemed to be against their principles. For their part, brands were happy to play along, appeasing consumer desires and sometimes outright cashing in on them. All that changed on October 7th.
The Middle-East conflict
“The last 10 days have been a pendulum swing moment for CEO communication,” said Dominic Reynolds at public relations company Kekst CNC, speaking to The Financial Times in the wake of the horrific October 7th Hamas attack on Israeli civilians [3].
“Since the pandemic, the direction of travel has been towards CEOs taking positions on social issues that matter to their customers or their people, even if there’s no link to business operations,” he went on. “We’ve observed that trend go into reverse this month. Our clients are anxious to show caution around this conflict, understanding that perceptions can be shifted by superfine nuances of language and tone.”
If that was true in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, it’s even more true now. As the conflict continues with no obvious end in sight, the Gazan death toll grows higher day by day while international support for Israel seems to be shifting from blanket to conditional. Meanwhile the fervour of feeling on both sides runs hot. Millennia of history haunt this conflict. It is complex and not likely to be fixed by a snarky Twitter post, despite many users’ attempts.
The level of complexity and nuance, paired with the strength of feeling on both sides, has dictated that companies who had proved themselves more than willing to wade into the waters of topical global issues over recent years now stand silent, conspicuously so. Because unlike some of the other social trends, this time there is no Big Bad to wag a finger at, no agreed upon villain of the piece they can ride the wave of feeling to publicly decry – no sexual abuser, racism, invading autocrat. It’s complicated geopolitics, and they hadn’t prepared for that.
Companies have trapped themselves in a corner. Vocally picking one side is a contentious move that would guarantee substantial backlash from the other. But unlike businesses of the past, they cannot just stay silent either. To distance themselves under the auspice of social issues being outside of their remit would have been fine – and expected – for decades. But they changed that when they first started chiming in on current affairs a few years ago. The question now is can they put Pandora back in the box.
Moral brands
Writing in New York magazine, Sam Adler-Bell observed that part of the reason for the fervour we’re seeing amongst citizens is that they feel helpless as to how they can affect what’s happening. “When our government is this unresponsive, it makes sense that Americans look closer to home for moral clarity,” he writes. “Powerless to influence actual policy outcomes, we settle for battling over discourse” [4].
In her article ‘The puritanical eye: Hyper-mediation, sex on film, and the disavowal of desire’, Carlee Gomes argues that at the dog-end of late-capitalism, “our ability to consume is the only remaining thing that’s ‘ours’” [5]. She makes the case that this is why audiences now want art and media from “unproblematic” artists – the last vestige by which we can express our morality is through what we choose to consume; if what we consume is made by moral figures, we too may be moral; if what we consume is made by monsters, we in some way share their sins. Her argument works equally well for why consumers have turned to “unproblematic” brands.
57% of global consumers buy or boycott products because of a brand’s stance on political or social issues, according to an Edelman’s Earned Brand survey of 2017 [6]. Nearly a quarter of consumers who said they prefer to buy from brands that share their beliefs are willing to pay more for those products. Aware that there was money to be made by taking the “right” stance, brands acted accordingly.
It represents “a real opportunity for multinational brands”, said Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman, the world’s biggest public relations firm according to revenue. “Brands have to take on bigger issues of the moment” [7]. And so they have.
Research by the Public Affairs Council in 2016 and 2021 shows how drastically the types of issues brands are willing to engage with has changed. In their 2016 survey, the dominant themes were sustainability and education. By 2021, “more than 80 per cent of companies said they were engaged in civil rights issues such as equity on race, gender and sexual orientation, and more than 70 per cent said they were public in supporting gender identity equality” [8].
Essentially, culture war topics were adopted as a business model. “The data show us that 67 per cent of people will try a brand for the first time because of its position on a controversial issue,” said Mark Renshaw, global chair of Edelman’s brand practice [9]. “That is customer acquisition. And they’re willing to pay more for those brands. You can gain customers and they will be better and more financially viable customers for you.”
Chris Padilla, head of global government affairs for IBM, called this transition to what some dubbed the new era of ‘corporate political responsibility’ as “the biggest single change I’ve seen in my job in the last 10 years” [10].
But as with any sudden change of such a scale, one must wonder whether businesses were really equipped to face the new state of play – one of virtuous engagement – after so many years of silence.
The new era
In the age of social media, companies learned quickly that by engaging with trending topics, their posts would receive greater traction. As such, the existing advertising model went out the window in favour of brands adopting ‘personas’ online. Soon breakfast cereals were freely discussing their experiences of racial discrimination while cleaning products bemoaned their anxiety. For someone newly wading in, this was through the looking glass stuff. Long gone was Michael Jordan’s infamous “Republicans buy sneakers too” approach to sales. Instead, online personae representing products representing brands would showcase their corporate values through deliberately personal engagement, with no topic off the table. In fact, engaging with topics of greater controversy was more likely to earn brands traction. They didn’t want to say anything controversial, however, just to engage with that space.
In her excoriating piece in The Atlantic, ‘Brands Have Nothing Real to Say About Racism’, Amanda Mull observes how “instead of taking concrete actions, many companies interpret consumers’ push for social responsibility as a strong desire for them to make vague statements about even vaguer values, such as “equality” and “community,” when something racist dominates the news” [11].
She goes on: “On top of the incentive of attention, companies feel the need to weigh in so that they don’t come across as apathetic. At the same time, they know how fraught strong political statements can be. That’s when you get language so bland, it borders on inanity—the blight of “inequality of all kinds” and the need for “meaningful change.” Companies who have no business associating themselves with anti-racism movements are trying to say the right thing without upsetting anyone, walking right up to the line of politics without stepping one toe over it.”
Mull’s point is undeniably true in the main. However, some brands’ toes did step a little further than most. Nike’s Colin Kaepernick campaign is the prime example. The company gave a voice and platform to the ostracised NFL star, who at the time was unable to find a team due to his taking a knee during the national anthem as a show of protest against racially motivated police brutality. This was not a wishy washy social media statement, it was a company putting its money where its mouth is. Controversy ensued, with some burning their shoes in protest and a 3% dip in Nike’s stock, equivalent to a $4 billion loss in company value. However, that stock soon bounced back, and then some. It regained its losses, grew by 5% and achieved a record high on the stock market [12]. The risk paid off.
Writing in Forbes, Juan Isaza, Vice President of Strategy and Innovation at DDB Latina and the President of DDB Mexico, observes that “many brands saw Nike’s audacity as the new gospel: boldly supporting social causes would invariably benefit brands” [13].
But just because it worked for Nike didn’t mean it would work for everyone. Many will remember Kendall Jenner’s infamous Black Lives Matter advert that Pepsi quickly pulled after the backlash. More recently, last year Bud Light collaborated with Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender influencer, and released a special edition beer. A number of the brand’s reliable consumers called for a boycott and the company’s sales plummeted by 10.5% between April and June. By July, Bud Light sales had declined 26% [14].
The lessons
Why do some brands benefit from wading into social issues while others come undone? One theory is that it comes down to consistency. Nike had a history of sponsoring black athletes and supporting black causes. The Kaepernick campaign took this a step further but it aligned with how people viewed the company, or at least didn’t drastically verge from it to the point of appearing cynical. Bud Light had no history of alignment with the LGBTQ+ community. Without existing credentials in that sphere, the decision to suddenly engage looked potentially disingenuous and opportunistic.
Founder & CEO of communications and investigative research firm Marathon Strategies, Phil Singer, writes in Forbes that the three things companies need to keep in mind when weighing in on social issues is to keep it consistent, to remember that the internal is as important as the external, and to put their money where their mouth is [15].
By keeping it consistent, he is referring to the above point regarding only engaging with topics for which brands have existing credentials. US corporate adviser Penta Group agrees, saying, “We advise clients to engage on political and social issues based on the relevance to their organisation and the severity of their impact on the company” [16]. Companies should not needlessly wade into unknown waters where they lack any foundations.
When he says that the internal is as important as the external, he means that companies should not just be thinking about how stakeholders will react but how their employees will too. “Look after them [your employees] rather than immediately turning all your attention to the outward facing statements,” advises Megan Reitz, professor of leadership and dialogue at Hult International Business School. “Your primary responsibility is to the impact on people who you have a direct relationship with” [17].
This point holds particular relevance for how companies today are handling Israel-Gaza. Many offices, especially in multi-cultural major cities, will have people with family or friends who are directly affected by this struggle. It is deeply sensitive, and likely weighing on them. Colleagues and employees should be looked after first and foremost. Certainly before making any decisions as to whether the company will weigh in on the topic, companies should consider the potential impact that decision will have on its workers.
When Singer advises companies to put their money where their mouth is, he is addressing the issue Amanda Mull raised in her piece on the empty words offered by a number of businesses looking to gain cultural cache by exploiting pernicious trends.
“These things cannot be just statements from CEOs,” says Chris Allieri, founder of Mulberry and Astor, a PR consultancy. “They have to be followed up with actual programmes and commitments. If they are going to take a stand on an issue, they have to make an investment along those lines” [19].
Turning tides
In his Forbes article, Juan Isaza argues that consumer appetite for brands to take social stances is diminishing [20]. He suggests that amongst biting economic troubles, consumers may be growing more pragmatic, as well as reaching a state of fatigue from the endless cultural battles that consume the modern world. Potentially, too, he posits, consumers are growing increasingly critical of what they see as opportunistic companies looking to cash in on real-world problems, as exemplified by the Bud Light story.
What comes next?
It could be that the window in which consumers wanted brands to be active in their corporate social responsibility will prove to be a short one, at least on more divisive issues (as opposed to topics like climate change, on which consumers still universally want companies to take action.)
A lesser role for businesses might suit everyone. “Frankly, a lot of CEOs and boards would like to be able to diminish the degree that they’re called upon to engage on these questions,” says Aron Cramer, chief executive of corporate social responsibility advisory group BSR [21].
When it comes to the ongoing conflict in the Middle-East, the impact it will have on how brands choose to engage on social issues moving forwards feels trivial in comparison to the tragedy so many are facing. Which is perhaps why it would be for the best that there was a severance between such real-world crises and polished statements about “corporate values”. One man’s suffering should not be another’s marketing opportunity. Some things are more important.
Sources
[3] https://www.ft.com/content/80bd2644-b810-4d6e-8a9c-d4a08432d9e4
[6] https://www.ft.com/content/7aef7e9a-52af-11e7-bfb8-997009366969
[7] https://www.ft.com/content/7aef7e9a-52af-11e7-bfb8-997009366969
[8] https://www.ft.com/content/5ceffa36-899a-4457-919f-b70902162f64
[9] https://www.ft.com/content/7aef7e9a-52af-11e7-bfb8-997009366969
[10] https://www.ft.com/content/5ceffa36-899a-4457-919f-b70902162f64
[11] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/brands-racism-protests-amazon-nfl-nike/612613/
[16] https://www.ft.com/content/80bd2644-b810-4d6e-8a9c-d4a08432d9e4
[17] https://www.ft.com/content/80bd2644-b810-4d6e-8a9c-d4a08432d9e4
[18] https://www.ft.com/content/80bd2644-b810-4d6e-8a9c-d4a08432d9e4
[19] https://www.ft.com/content/7aef7e9a-52af-11e7-bfb8-997009366969
[21] https://www.ft.com/content/5ceffa36-899a-4457-919f-b70902162f64
Introduction
The EU AI Act was endorsed by the European Parliament on Wednesday 13th March. It is expected to become law in April following the formality of final approval from further member states.
This is a landmark moment. Last year the Biden administration signed an executive order requiring major AI companies to notify the government when developing a model that could pose serious risks, while Chinese regulators have also set out rules focused on generative AI. But the EU AI Act is a significant step up when it comes to the regulation of artificial intelligence and could serve as a blueprint for how global governance handles the technology moving forwards.
Dragos Tudorache, an MEP who helped draft the AI Act, said: “The AI Act has nudged the future of AI in a human-centric direction, in a direction where humans are in control of the technology and where it, the technology, helps us leverage new discoveries, economic growth, societal progress and unlock human potential” [1].
While by definition the act only covers EU territories, its implications stretch further. No companies, even and especially the tech giants based across the Atlantic, are going to want to forgo access to Europe. As such, in order to work in the EU, they will need to comply with its regulations. “Anybody that intends to produce or use an AI tool will have to go through that rulebook,” said Guillaume Couneson, a partner at law firm Linklaters [2].
The European Parliament has precedent of making influential first moves in tech regulation, as evidenced by its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Digital Markets Act (DMA). The EU AI Act is likely to have an equally global impact.
“The act is enormously consequential, in terms of shaping how we think about AI regulation and setting a precedent,” says Rishi Bommasani, who researches the societal impact of AI at Stanford University in California [3].
Although, as with all things artificial intelligence, there are a number of unknowns. Other governing bodies will be monitoring how the EU AI Act progresses closely. Couneson notes that “the EU approach will likely only be copied if it is shown to work” [4].
What are the laws?
The EU AI Act seeks to set a definitive definition of AI that is also broad enough to cover the diversity of AI’s current use-points and any potential future developments. As such, drawing from the OECD’s definition, the act describes an AI system as: “a machine-based system designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy and that may exhibit adaptiveness after deployment and that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments.” [5]
The act plans to regulate AI according to a tiered system based on perceived risk. Systems that carry “unacceptable risk” are banned in their entirety. Such systems include those that use biometric data to infer sensitive information such as a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
Also outlawed are government-run social scoring systems that use AI to rank citizens based on their behaviour and trustworthiness, enabling Minority Report-esque predictive policing. Emotion recognition, which would give schools or workplaces the ability to monitor workers’ emotional states and activity by monitoring facial tics and body posture, is prohibited. As is the untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases. There are exceptions. Biometric identification systems can be used in special circumstances such as in the prevention of a terror threat or in sexual exploitation and kidnapping cases.
For lower-risk systems such as Generative AI – the term for systems that produce plausible text, image, video and audio from simple prompts, the most prominent example being ChatGPT – developers will be forced to tell users when they are interacting with AI-generated content, as well as providing detailed summaries of the content used to train the model, which must adhere to EU Copyright law.
It’s unclear if the law can be retroactively applied to existing models. For example, in the cases of alleged copyright infringement for which The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Getty Images is suing StabilityAI. A number of writers, musicians and artists have also raised concerns that their work was used to train models without their consent or financial compensation.
Moving forwards, open-source models which are freely available to the public, unlike “closed” models like ChatGPT’s GPT-4, will be exempt from the copyright requirement. This approach of encouraging open-source AI differs from US strategy, according to Bommasani. He suggests that “the EU’s line of reasoning is that open source is going to be vital to getting the EU to compete with the US and China” [6].
People, companies or public bodies that issue deepfakes will need to disclose whether the content has been artificially generated or manipulated. If it is done for “evidently” artistic, creative or satirical work, it will still need to be flagged, but in an “appropriate manner that does not hamper the display or enjoyment of the work”.
High-risk AI systems like those used in critical infrastructure or medical devices will face more regulations, requiring those systems to “assess and reduce risks,” be transparent about data usage and ensure human oversight.
Fines will range from €7.5m or 1.5% of a company’s total worldwide turnover – whichever is higher – for giving incorrect information to regulators, to €15m or 3% of worldwide turnover for breaching certain provisions of the act, such as transparency obligations, to €35m, or 7% of turnover, for deploying or developing banned AI tools. More proportionate fines will be used for smaller companies and startups.
The reaction: The (tempered) positives
“Europe is now a global standard-setter in AI,” wrote Thierry Breton, the European commissioner for internal market, on X (formerly Twitter), leading praise for the bill [7].
The lobby group Business Europe also acknowledged its historic resonance, with director general Markus J. Beyreris describing it as a “pivotal moment for AI development in Europe” [8].
“We finally have the world’s first binding law on artificial intelligence, to reduce risks, create opportunities, combat discrimination, and bring transparency,” said Italian MEP and Internal Market Committee co-rapporteur Brando Benifei [9].
However, many who generally approve of the bill – or even euphorically celebrated it – also tempered their praise with reservations, mainly regarding whether it can be effectively put into practice.
Dragos Tudorache, MEP, demonstrated both sides when he said, “The rules we have passed in this mandate to govern the digital domain – not just the AI Act – are truly historical, pioneering. But making them all work in harmony with the desired effect and turning Europe into the digital powerhouse of the future will be the test of our lifetime” [10].
This is the prevailing sentiment. Actualising these ideas will be difficult. In a similar vein to Mr Tudorache, after showing his support in saying that the bill was pivotal, Business Europe’s Markus J. Beyreris also noted that: “The need for extensive secondary legislation and guidelines raises significant questions about legal certainty and law’s interpretation in practice, which are crucial for investment decisions” [11].
Jenia Jitsev, an AI researcher at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany and co-founder of LAION (Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network), a non-profit organisation aimed at democratising machine learning, showed even greater scepticism. “The demand to be transparent is very important,” they said. “But there was little thought spent on how these procedures have to be executed” [12].
The reaction: The negative
Those above considered the legislation to contain good ideas that would be difficult to implement. Others consider the ideas themselves to be wrong. The bill’s leading critics tend to fall into one of two camps: (1) those who think the bill is regulating too much (2) those who think it is regulating too little.
Those who think the bill is regulating too much are of the opinion that applying limits to AI development does nothing but quash innovation, slowing our progress and potentially denying the benefits truly powerful AI could bring.
Cecilia Bonefeld-Dahl, director-general for DigitalEurope, which represents the continent’s technology sector, said: “We have a deal, but at what cost? We fully supported a risk-based approach based on the uses of AI, not the technology itself, but the last-minute attempt to regulate foundation models has turned this on its head.
“The new requirements – on top of other sweeping new laws like the Data Act – will take a lot of resources for companies to comply with, resources that will be spent on lawyers instead of hiring AI engineers” [13].
In general, the major tech players are not enamoured with the idea of regulation. This is hardly surprising given that it will serve to limit their potential profits. “It is critical we don’t lose sight of AI’s huge potential to foster European innovation and enable competition, and openness is key here,” said Meta’s head of EU affairs [14].
Last year OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman caused a minor stir when he suggested the company might pull out of Europe if it cannot comply with the AI Act. Though he later backtracked on this statement, which was likely made as a way of applying pressure on regulators [15].
Anand Sanwal, chief executive of the New York-based data company CB Insights, wrote that the EU now had more AI regulations than meaningful AI companies. “So a heartfelt congrats to the EU on their landmark AI legislation and continued efforts to remain a nothing-burger market for technology innovation. Bravo!” [16]
After the preliminary bill passed in December, Innovation Editor at the Financial Times John Thornhill wrote that, “The conjugation of modern technology tends to go: the US innovates, China emulates and Europe regulates. That certainly appears to be the case with artificial intelligence” [17].
French President Emmanuel Macron seems to agree. “We can decide to regulate much faster and much stronger than our major competitors,” the French leader said in December. “But we will regulate things that we will no longer produce or invent. This is never a good idea” [18].
Macron’s scepticism was to be expected. As talks reached the final stretch last year, the French and German governments both tried to water the bill down, pushing back against some of the strictest ideas for regulating generative AI, arguing that the rules will hurt European start-ups such as France’s Mistral AI and Germany’s Aleph Alpha [19].
This move was heavily criticised by those who feel that the bill regulates too little. Civil-society groups such as Corporate Europe Observatory raised concerns that European companies and Big Tech were overly influential in shaping the final text [20].
“This one-sided influence meant that ‘general-purpose AI’ was largely exempted from the rules and only required to comply with a few transparency obligations,” watchdogs including the observatory and LobbyControl wrote in a statement, referring to AI systems capable of performing a wider range of tasks [21].
After it was announced that Mistral had partnered with Microsoft, legislators raised further concerns. Kai Zenner, a parliamentary assistant key in the writing of the Act and now an adviser to the United Nations on AI policy, wrote that the move was strategically smart and “maybe even necessary” for the French start-up, but said “the EU legislator got played again” [22].
Digital-rights group Access Now said the final text of the legislation was full of loopholes and failed to adequately protect people from some of the most dangerous uses of AI [23].
Kilian Vieth-Ditlmann, deputy head of policy at German non-profit organisation Algorithmwatch, which campaigns for responsible AI use, agreed. “We fear that the exemptions for national security in the AI Act provide member states with a carte blanche to bypass crucial AI regulations and create a high risk of abuse,” she said [24].
Next steps: For business
In wake of the act, PwC recommends all businesses that deal with AI take the following steps.
Firstly, to create an AI exposure register that allows companies to assess their exposure to all AI-related risks. Second, to risk-assess each of the use cases you have identified in your AI Exposure register in line with the EU AI Act Risk Assessment Framework so as to mitigate any potential risks and breaches. Third, to establish appropriate AI governance structures to manage the risk of AI responsibly in line with the EU AI Act. Fourth, to implement an upskilling programme and roll out awareness sessions to equip stakeholders for responsible use and oversight [25].
Next steps: For Ireland
Writing in the Irish Independent, Jim Dowling, CEO of the AI firm Hopsworks and associate professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, says that the EU AI Act can be an opportunity for Ireland.
He particularly focuses on the “regulatory sandbox” provision included in the bill, which means that national governments will be able to provide infrastructure support for their local AI companies to build out their AI with state support. Dowling argues this “regulatory sandbox” can “create a nurturing space for European and Irish companies to build globally competitive AI platforms before the wave of massively capitalised US-based companies, such as Sam Altman’s OpenAI, dominate the global AI market” [26].
He likens the opportunity to that taken by China in the 2010s, in which they legislated to protect their nascent cloud computing companies – Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance. The combination of regulations and large-scale investment “gave their local cloud computing companies time to grow from seeds into global cloud computing giants.”
He thinks the EU AI Act can do the same for Ireland, but that the time to act is now. Ireland “has a budget surplus and not many legacy companies to support. If we invest now in AI, the EU AI act will give our companies the time they need to create network effects within Europe, and then be ready to take on the world.”
The EU AI Act
Artificial intelligence is both a threat and an opportunity, no amount of legislation is going to change that. Overregulation threatens to stall progress and innovation. Under-regulation threatens our civil liberties or perhaps our very existence. The EU AI Act is a landmark moment, but there will be many more landmark moments to come.
More on AI
The Ethical Minefield of Artificial Intelligence
Sources
[2] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-act-passes-european-union-law-regulation-e04ec251
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00497-8
[4] https://theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/14/what-will-eu-proposed-regulation-ai-mean-consumers
[5] https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=4ba63092-0cc5-447b-bae9-157afd91c11e
[6] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00497-8
[10] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2024/03/13/eu-parliament-embraces-new-ai-rules/
[12] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00497-8
[13] https://www.ft.com/content/d5bec462-d948-4437-aab1-e6505031a303
[14] https://theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/14/what-will-eu-proposed-regulation-ai-mean-consumers
[16] https://www.ft.com/content/a402cea8-a4a3-43bb-b01c-d84167d857d5
[17] https://www.ft.com/content/a402cea8-a4a3-43bb-b01c-d84167d857d5
[18] https://www.ft.com/content/2b18b3e7-5b92-4577-9c8e-6db2bdd016d8
[19] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2024/03/13/eu-parliament-embraces-new-ai-rules/
[20] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2024/03/13/eu-parliament-embraces-new-ai-rules/
[21] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2024/03/13/eu-parliament-embraces-new-ai-rules/
[22] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2024/03/13/eu-parliament-embraces-new-ai-rules/
[23] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-act-passes-european-union-law-regulation-e04ec251
[24] https://theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/14/what-will-eu-proposed-regulation-ai-mean-consumers
Introduction
Would you ask a stranger for €100? Or to sit on Santa’s lap? How about to sleep on the mattress of a furniture store?
For most people, the answer is probably no. Unless, of course, they were trying rejection therapy.
What is rejection therapy?
Rejection therapy started out as a game created by Canadian Jason Comely. The premise was simple: to desensitise yourself to rejection, expose yourself to as much of it as possible. For 30 days straight, the task was to get out of your comfort zone and ask for something to which you expect the response to be “no”. It could be to jump the queue at Starbucks, to take a photo of a stranger or to make an announcement on a train. Or bigger still – to drive a police car, fly a small plane, play football in a stranger’s back garden. Anything that is likely to get you good and firmly rejected, leaving you better placed to handle what Comely calls “the tyranny of social rejection” [1].
Although started by Comely, rejection therapy was popularised by someone else.
In 2012, Jia Jiang quit his well-paid but unfulfilling job at a Fortune 500 company and decided to go out on his own, starting a new business. After being rejected for an investment, he was left surprised by how much the experience hurt him. Twenty-four years prior, his first grade teacher had told her class of six year-olds to give compliments to all their classmates. They did. Except by Jiang’s turn, they were all out of kind words. He got nothing, and left the classroom feeling rejected and dejected. And even though so many years had passed since, when the investor told him no, he felt exactly the same again. He decided that if he was ever going to be a success in business, he’d have to thicken his skin and confront his unhealthy relationship with rejection head on. That’s when he stumbled on rejection therapy.
In 2016, Jiang’s TED Talk on the transformative impact rejection therapy had on his life went viral. He was given book deals, speaking opportunities, and ultimately, later in 2016, Comely called him and they mutually decided that Jiang would take over the reins of the rejection therapy crusade. Comely gave his successor control of the SocialRejection domain that he had set up many years prior. Jiang started his business running rejection therapy consultations, and in 2018 launched his mobile app. As of 2023, the hashtag “rejection therapy” had more than 72 million views on TikTok.
The science of rejection therapy
It’s perfectly natural to hate rejection. In fact, we can’t help it. It’s part of our neuro-chemistry.
“We started really simply with the question: what goes on in the brain when people feel socially excluded?” says social psychologist Naomi Eisenberger, speaking to The Guardian, whose study with her UCLA colleague Matthew Lieberman sought out to answer that very question [2].
“We brought people into the fMRI scanner and had them go through a game in which they were excluded,” she continued.
The virtual game, Cyberball, involved subjects tossing a ball back and forth with two other participants. Except the other players didn’t really exist – they were avatars programmed to stop throwing the ball to the subject at a certain point in the game.
Eisenberger tracked the subjects’ brains, monitoring what happened while the subjects were included and excluded from the social activity. She found that the regions of the brain that were activated when a person felt left out were the same regions that were activated during physical pain.
“From this early study we sort of thought, ‘OK, maybe there’s a reason people talk about feeling rejected as feeling hurt. Maybe there’s a good reason we use physical-pain words to describe these experiences of social pain.”
Rejection hurts. But what Jiang and now many others have found through rejection therapy is that over time it hurts less. This follows the same patterns as exposure therapy.
Upon hearing about rejection therapy, clinical psychologist Michael Stein, who has specialised in treating anxiety disorders using exposure therapy for more than 14 years, assisting clients from his private practice, Anxiety Solutions, in Denver, Colorado, responded, “It’s fantastic. It’s exactly what I would recommend for people with social anxiety” [3].
“Short-term avoidance of anxiety leads to long-term maintenance of anxiety,” he continues. “Anything you do when you feel anxious to try to make yourself feel better might work in the moment, but it actually guarantees more anxiety the next time you’re in a similar situation.”
Dr Peter Tuerk, a clinical psychologist who uses rejection therapy to treat adolescent social anxiety, agrees. “What we want is people to learn that they can tolerate the distress that’s associated with their physiological responses,” he says. “What happens over time is you habituate. Just like when you jump in a pool: it feels cold, then you wait, and that gets better.” [4]
On his first day of his self-prescribed 100-day rejection therapy challenge, Jiang asked a stranger for $100. The man said no. But then he asked Jiang why he wanted the money. Jiang didn’t have an answer. In fact, he just ran away, not engaging with the question. He realised this was his problem in microcosm, rather than facing up to his rejections, he was running away. He made a promise to himself that he would never do that again.
The next day, he asked for a “burger refill” at his local burger joint. This time, when the confused burger joint employee asked what that was, he did not run, he engaged. He explained that it was the same as a drinks refill except for burgers. He said he liked the burger and wanted another one for free. The employee told him it wasn’t possible but said he’d bring the idea up with his manager. Jiang left, happy with his rejection and with the fact that he’d had the courage to see the process out.
Jiang cites day three of his rejection therapy as the day that changed his life.
Don’t ask, don’t get
You may have seen the video. 6.2 million people have.
On day 3, Jiang enters a local Krispy Kreme and asks for donuts that look like the Olympic rings. Rather than rejecting this request outright, the woman behind the counter spends a moment thinking, then starts drawing diagrams, sketching out how one might go about realising his request. She asks Jiang the colours of the rings. He doesn’t even know – why would he? This request was bound to get rejected.
Not only does the woman come back 15 minutes later with a box of donuts designed to look like the Olympic rings, but she gives it to Jiang free of charge.
This opened up a whole new window in Jiang’s thinking. It wasn’t just that getting used to hearing no was good for you, it was that if you ask for what you want, you just might get it. With that in mind, within three months, Jiang had achieved his lifelong ambition: he’d taught a college class. How had he done it? He’d asked, and someone had said yes.
“When I finished teaching that class I walked out crying,” he says during his TED Talk. “I saw I could fulfil my life’s dream just by simply asking.”
Many others who have tried rejection therapy have had similar experiences. They ask for something ridiculous, something unreasonable even, and people go out of their way to help them get it.
It shows that it’s not just the fear of rejection that is in our heads but the expectation of it too. How many things do we not ask for in life simply because we presume we’ll be rejected? We’re so focused on what we assume will be the humiliation of the no that we don’t even consider there could be a yes. Rejection therapy is not about getting yeses, quite the opposite, but it happens far more often than one might expect, because people are kinder and the world a little less scary than we tend to think. And if you get rejected, well, that is rather the point.
Celebrating rejection
In a similar mould, some groups of academics have even started having rejection parties. Cognitive-science professor Barbara Sarnecka and two of her graduate students wanted to change their experience of professional rejection and so made a rule: for every 100 rejections amassed by their group, be it for grants, journal articles, fellowships, you name it, they would throw a party to celebrate [5].
One of the poisonous aspects of rejection is that it is so laced with shame that people avoid talking about it. As such, when one hears of another’s success, we assume that’s all they’re having, given we’ve heard nothing of their failures but are mortally aware of our own. Rejection parties or any such event that allows people to acknowledge and celebrate their own failures – and crucially those of others too – removes that sense of shame and shows us that we’re not alone.
Rhaina Cohen, producer and editor for NPR’s Embedded podcast and the author of The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center, writes in The Atlantic that in her rejection-collection group she has “seen how rejection stings less when it’s reframed as progress and handled communally. I’ve also observed how the collection encourages people to increase their submissions. When you see how much effort your fellow rejectees are putting in, it’s hard not to feel proud of their attempts, and motivated to put yourself out there more.” [6]
Detractors
Of course, there are those who don’t buy into rejection therapy. Dr Becky Spelman, a counselling psychologist and clinical director of Private Therapy Clinic, says that, “The effectiveness of rejection therapy in confronting and managing fears is not as well established as exposure therapy.” [7]
“In 30 days of rejection therapy, individuals might develop increased confidence in dealing with minor social rejections or become more comfortable with asking for what they want – but the impact may be limited without comprehensive therapeutic intervention,” she adds.
Meanwhile, writing in Forbes, Aaron Agius, co-founder and managing director of the global marketing agency Louder.Online argues that rejection therapy may help immunise one from the painful feelings that come with rejection, but that that’s no good thing.
“I’m not sure it’s in everybody’s best interests to get that comfortable with rejection,” he writes. “The fear of rejection is what keeps us trying. It keeps us sharp. And it’s one of the best teachers you can have.” [8]
Agius even uses rejection as a motivational tool and differentiator.
“I don’t want to make myself immune to rejection because I want rejection to power me. I want my ability to handle it – and to handle it well – to be the thing that sets me apart. The thing that means I’ll be in business long after those who can’t cut it are gone.”
Can rejection therapy help you?
Everyone is different. Some, like Agius, don’t need or want rejection therapy because rejection is not holding them back – in some ways it’s pushing them forwards. For others, like Jiang, fear of rejection and the associated feelings it brings was preventing him from achieving what he wanted to achieve and maximising his capability.
Only you know your personal relationship with rejection. But if it is disruptively negative, why not give rejection therapy a go? The worst you’ll hear is no.
As Jiang surmised, “Rejection was my curse, was my bogeyman. It had bothered me my whole life because I was running away from it. Then I started embracing it. I turned that into the biggest gift in my life.” [9]
More on Resilience
The psychology of success with Simon Hartley – Podcast
Game Changer: Mindset Mastery with Christian Straka – Podcast
Bouncing Back from Professional Failure
High Standards and Low Expectations: a Blueprint for Wellbeing
Sources
[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/01/celebrate-your-rejections-failures/621327/
[5] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/01/celebrate-your-rejections-failures/621327/
[6] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/01/celebrate-your-rejections-failures/621327/
[9] https://www.ted.com/talks/jia_jiang_what_i_learned_from_100_days_of_rejection?language=en
Introduction
What milk do you want with your coffee? Which song of the millions at your fingertips do you want to start your day? Which of that growing stack of emails are you going to answer first? Choose this. Now that. Are you sure? And again. Choices, choices, decisions, decisions, all day, every day – and aren’t you feeling tired?
By some estimates, adults today make 2,000 decisions an hour [1]. By others, 35,000 decisions a day [2]. Either way, it’s an overload. And it’s causing decision fatigue.
What is decision fatigue?
Decision fatigue is “the idea that after making many decisions, your ability to make more and more decisions over the course of a day becomes worse,” says Lisa MacLean, MD, psychiatrist and chief wellness officer at Henry Ford Health System. “The more decisions you have to make, the more fatigue you develop and the more difficult it can become” [3].
The immediacy afforded us by the internet and 24-hour news and work cycle, as well as the endless variety of almost identical products available to us at any given moment, means that people today are making more choices than ever before.
By some accounts, the average American supermarket in 1976 carried 9,000 different products. That number is thought to have swelled to 40,000 [4]. If you’re looking to buy some hangers for your clothes, Amazon provides you with over 200,000 options [5]. For the global-manufacturing industry, that’s great. Its output has ballooned 75% since 2007 to $35 trillion [6]. For the average consumer, though, it means endless scrolling trying to decipher marginal differences in the name of getting the best deal. It wears you out.
Decision fatigue in action
In a study described in the book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by John Tierney and Roy Baumeister, researchers analysed 1,100 decisions made by an Israeli parole board. Their decision-making was found to shift enormously throughout the day. Overall, parole was granted roughly a third of the time. But prisoners whose cases were heard early in the morning received parole about 70% of the time, while prisoners appearing late in the afternoon were granted freedom only 10% of the time [7].
This is not to say that the judges were making wrong choices later in the day. Rather, they were defaulting to easy ones.
In their report for Royal Society Open Finance, Quantifying the cost of decision fatigue: suboptimal risk decisions in finance, Tobias Baer and Simone Schnall evaluated the financial implications of making too many decisions. Their findings revealed that people who make a lot of decisions every day will eventually get tired and start defaulting to the easiest choice [8].
Other examples are plentiful. In voting, research shows it’s detrimental to be lower on the ballot paper [9]. In financial institutions, the accuracy of forecasts made by stock market analysts was found to decline as the day wore on [10]. And in healthcare, nurses were found to make less efficient and more expensive clinical decisions the longer they worked without a break [11].
It’s not complicated. For all the complexity of our genetic make-up and the improbable anthropological and technological heights we’ve reached, humans are still basically simple creatures. As the day goes on, we get tired. When we’re tired, we make worse decisions.
Why is it a problem?
Casting the situation in such a simplified light has its drawbacks, though. If this is just part of our humanity, some inherent flaw in our design, then surely there’s no use fighting it? This is merely the human condition playing out.
Except, evidently, this isn’t simply the way of things, as it wasn’t always like this. Yes, fatigue has always been part of our nature and affects our performance, but the specific decision-making aspect has exponentially amplified and worsened, as evidenced by the number of products on the supermarket shelves and the infinite hanger problem. We are wasting precious amounts of our finite energy on trivial decisions.
A 2021 American Psychological Association survey found that nearly one-third of adults – and nearly half of millennials – are struggling with basic decisions like what to eat or wear [12]. And if such menial, everyday decisions as those feel difficult, how do you think actual consequential ones feel?
How it feels
Naysayers would like to write decision fatigue off as an excuse for lazy workers, particularly those of the millennial and Gen Z generations, who simply don’t have the work ethic of their elder peers. But the impact decision fatigue has on brain function is real and has been measured.
“A person with decision fatigue may feel tired, have brain fog or experience other signs and symptoms of physical or mental fatigue,” explained Dr. MacLean [13]. “The phenomenon is cumulative so that as the person makes more decisions, they may feel worse or more drained as the day progresses.” She added that decision fatigue can also “cause you to simply do nothing, which can cause even more problems.”
As The Washington Post put it, “When decision fatigue kicks in, you may feel like you just don’t have the mental bandwidth to deal with more decisions. This can lead to decisional paralysis or depleted self-control, causing you to avoid making certain choices entirely, to go with the default option or to make ones that aren’t in line with your goals or values” [14].
The problem can be self-fulfilling. As Stanford University researcher Carol Dweck found in 2011, decision fatigue more negatively affects people who already expect their willpower to be low [15]. In other words, if you expect your performance to drop off by the end of the day, it likely will.
It reaches a point where people don’t just make bad decisions or easy ones, but see no point in making any decision at all. “We can get to this state of, does anything even matter anymore? There’s this almost nihilist point that you reach,” says Dane Jensen, the chief executive of Third Factor, a Toronto-based performance-consulting firm [16].
External factors contribute to this nihilism. Around half of adults said planning for the future felt impossible during the pandemic [17]. For many, the precarious state of today’s geopolitics is also having a negative effect. “It’s hard to make decisions even when the world isn’t throwing you curveball after curveball and freaking you out,” says Dr. Milkman, author of the book How to Change [18].
That theory is backed up by a landmark study published in Science that showed that being in poverty hurts one’s ability to make decisions about school, finances, and life. The impact on impoverished people, for whom the world really is throwing curveball after curveball, was found to impose a mental burden similar to losing 13 IQ points [19].
How to fight decision fatigue
Dr MacLean offers advice for combatting decision fatigue [20]. One way to make fewer decisions, she suggests, is to “streamline your choices.” By making a list before going to the shop, you have saved yourself the energy of deciding in the moment what you want or need.
In a corporate setting, she suggests delegating decisions rather than trying to micromanage. Given Asana’s 2022 Anatomy of Work Special Report found that nearly 7 in 10 executives say burnout has affected their ability to make decisions, this advice is much needed [21]. “By delegating, you also empower people by showing them that you trust them,” Dr MacLean adds.
She also suggests making big decisions in the morning. “Research shows that the best time to make decisions is in the morning…[it] is when we make the most accurate and thoughtful decisions, and we tend to be more cautious and meticulous. We hit a plateau in the afternoon and by evening our decisions may be more impulsive. So, definitely don’t make big decisions when you’re tired or hungry.”
Cutting down on perfectionism, too, can be helpful. If you’ve narrowed down your lunch spot to two or three places, just go to one and enjoy it without thinking whether the others might have been better. This is what Nell Derick Debevoise, author of Going First: Finding the Courage to Lead Purposefully and Inspire Action,calls the “decisions are for suckers” approach [22].
Ms Derick Debevoise suggests avoiding making decisions altogether, at least for one day every now and then. “It is about trusting the natural ebb and flow of life,” she says, “allowing opportunities to present themselves organically, and following intuition and instinct instead of succumbing to the paralysing weight of decision-making.”
Routine, too, is useful for combatting decision fatigue. Rather than having to decide what you’re going to do when 9am comes around, you simply follow your planned daily agenda, be it responding to emails or going for a run. Less important tasks can be tuned to autopilot through the prism of routine, saving mental energy.
“Another idea is to have a handful of go-to outfits planned out to further minimise decisions made,” Dr. MacLean adds. “The bottom line is, look at all the big and little decisions you make every day and think about how you can simplify your life.”
One devotee of such thinking is Barack Obama, who tried to remove extraneous, small decisions from his life so he was in the optimum state for the big ones. During his presidency, Obama would ask for “decision memos” with three check-boxes at the bottom: agree, disagree and let’s discuss. He also only wore grey or blue suits and, during the presidential campaign in 2008, he and his wife made a “no new friends” rule [23].
This approach can sound monotonous. Perhaps you’re reading this and thinking that such discipline and routine will carve away at your creativity. But it’s the exact opposite.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Jim Sollisch, a creative director and partner at Marcus Thomas, an advertising agency in Cleveland, Ohio, says that he tries to take away as many choices from his workers as he can. “I want to put them in a box,” he says. “A very small box…People think they hate boxes, but it’s in boxes that the creative process thrives. In a tight box, the will is not drained by too much decision-making. You are free to find the unexpected, to focus on what matters” [24].
“Having data feels like power,” he continues. “Having choices feels like freedom. Sometimes having both is having neither.”
Decision fatigue
In a world that feels determined to force you into a decision a second, you must be active in setting yourself free from that burden. It may not feel like you’re being impaired by the choice between the latte or the cappuccino, the granola bar or the bagel, but you are, just a tiny bit, 35,000 times in a row.
Do yourself a favour. Make the choice to choose less.
More on Decision-Making
Mastering Decisions: The Strategic Edge of Red Teaming in a Biased World
More on Delegation
Why You Should Delegate – And How To Do It Effectively
Sources
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cure-for-decision-fatigue-1465596928
[5] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/too-many-options/590185/
[6] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/too-many-options/590185/
[7] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cure-for-decision-fatigue-1465596928
[9] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/long-ballots-democracy/413701/
[12] https://www.wsj.com/articles/decision-fatigue-is-real-heres-how-to-beat-it-this-year-11641186063
[15] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/12/ill-do-it-latersomeone/578173/
[16] https://www.wsj.com/articles/decision-fatigue-is-real-heres-how-to-beat-it-this-year-11641186063
[17] https://www.wsj.com/articles/decision-fatigue-is-real-heres-how-to-beat-it-this-year-11641186063
[18] https://www.wsj.com/articles/decision-fatigue-is-real-heres-how-to-beat-it-this-year-11641186063
[21] https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2022/12/06/the-energized-few-and-the-exhausted-many-senior-leaders-and-decision-fatigue-in-a-volatile-environment/?sh=4a821f1736b0
[23] https://www.ft.com/content/6c589726-4906-11e6-8d68-72e9211e86ab
[24] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cure-for-decision-fatigue-1465596928
Introduction
In May of last year, the “Godfather of AI” Dr. Geoffrey Hinton announced his resignation from Google citing concerns over the potential ramifications of advancing AI technologies [1]. Six months later, OpenAI’s board ousted CEO Sam Altman over concerns he was placing technological advancements ahead of human safety and ethical concerns, only to bring him back four days later [2]. Then in February of this year, Elon Musk sued both OpenAI and Altman saying they had abandoned the startup’s original mission to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity and not for profit [3].
Put simply, how to implement artificial intelligence in an ethical manner currently poses more questions than answers, with disagreements over the necessary direction of travel growing increasingly heated. How to handle data privacy, discrimination, deepfake technology, job losses and the environmental impact are all problems in need of solutions.
Data privacy
AI is built on data. But questions exist over how the data being used to feed its insatiable appetite is being stored, used and accessed. Sensitive information such as people’s location, sexual preferences, health records and habits are all hoarded somewhere in the internet’s great database – we traded privacy for convenience some time ago. But who can access this data? Who is it being disseminated to? Is it liable to a data breach from hackers or unwarranted surveillance from governmental or corporate entities? It’s not clear. Worse still, by definition, “black box” AI is not understood even by its creators [4]. How it chooses to manipulate our data is and will remain an unknown; all we can do is cross our fingers and hope it’s working in our interests.
Of course, data privacy laws exist. But they were written up prior to AI’s emergence and as such fall well short in managing its capabilities. The average citizen knows little of what information they have unknowingly given away over the years, much less how it is being used. This will only worsen.
Discrimination
Many fear that AI could end up perpetuating inequality and discrimination. As noted, AI models are based on data. As such, any data that is fed into the system – no matter whether that data demonstrates biases or is made up of poorly represented subsets – will be used and built upon. Examples of biassed algorithmic decision-making have already been reported in healthcare, hiring, and other settings [5]. For example, a recruiting tool at Amazon was found to prefer male candidates for jobs that required technical skills [6].
Algorithmic bias is complicated. Would implementing an algorithm that displays discriminatory bias be acceptable if the level of bias appears to be less than that displayed by society as a whole, for example? An industry with a record of giving just 30% of jobs to women would be improved by an algorithm that gave 35%. And yet there feels something troubling about such a concession. Perhaps it is the optimist’s view that individual and even institutional biases can be rooted out – algorithmic ones cannot. To sign off on the problem would be to give it legitimacy.
Tara Behrend, PhD, a professor at Michigan State University’s School of Human Resources and Labor Relations, notes that the problem is not always as high-stakes as hiring, but can be just as consequential. For example, an AI-driven career guidance system could unintentionally steer a woman away from jobs in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and maths), influencing her entire life trajectory.
“That can be potentially hugely consequential for a person’s future decisions and pathways,” Behrend says. “It’s equally important to think about whether those tools are designed well” [7].
Another potential problem is that AI is not just feeding off our existing biases but forging more. “AI has many biases, but we’re often told not to worry, because there will always be a human in control,” said Helena Matute, PhD, a professor of experimental psychology at Universidad de Deusto in Bilbao, Spain. “But how do we know that AI is not influencing what a human believes and what a human can do?” [8]
In a study Matute conducted with graduate student Lucía Vicente, participants classified images for a simulated medical diagnosis either with or without the help of AI. They found that when the AI system made errors, humans inherited the same biassed decision-making, even when they stopped using the AI. “If you think of a doctor working with this type of assistance, will they be able to oppose the AI’s incorrect advice?” Matute asked.
Any football fans reading this may recall the effect being “sent to the monitor” by VAR officials had on referees when first implemented in the Premier League. Rather than being used to reconsider their original decision, referees overturned practically every time, with the act of going to the monitor serving as little more than a form of ritual theatre. No matter how good at our jobs we are, if we are told we’re wrong by a higher authority, our natural inclination is to believe them.
Job loss
According to a report by Goldman Sachs, AI has the potential to replace around 300 million full-time jobs [9]. One quarter of all the work tasks in Europe and the US could be automated [10]. The effect could be catastrophic. Would the government then subsidise these displaced workers? Would new industries emerge? Or would we witness unemployment, poverty and then likely protests and riots on an as yet unprecedented scale? No one’s quite sure.
Utopians tend to posit that AI will simply take over the tasks we don’t want to do, giving us more time to focus on ourselves and better, more profound endeavours. Similar arguments were made about typewriters, printers and the internet. As it turned out, all that really changed was the amount of work one was expected to get through in a day. We raise our expectations to meet the tools available to us. Productivity is the name of the game; that’s not going to change.
Businesses will be forced to make tough choices. The people versus profit decision has always been a component of corporate thinking, but will soon become far more stark. If a company sees that it can save a huge percentage every year by moving to newly available AI tools, will it really show loyalty to its staff? If so, how much, and for how long? Those that choose to prioritise profit, as many will, will have to embrace a swift, grand overhaul that could produce unparalleled turmoil. One also wonders what the effect will be on the psyche of retained staff as they see the ease with which their colleagues are automated out the door.
Deepfakes
We’re already seeing increasingly sophisticated deepfakes online. At the moment, the falsity is detectable. Soon it won’t be. The ramifications are terrifying on a number of levels. Politically, we’re going to see democracy pushed to the brink as videos emerge of candidates for office saying or doing something repulsive days before an election, potentially swaying undecideds. Worse still could be deepfake footage from war zones. The wrong video believed by the wrong people could cause an escalation in a conflict. At a minimum it will pour fuel on the fire.
In the post-truth society we occupy, citizens already live in different realities based on the ideology they submit to. The gulf seems set to widen.
That’s not to mention the effect deepfakes will have on scamming. Should you receive a call from a loved one who claims to have been kidnapped and is desperately asking for money, will you be able to believe them? AI technology is already nearing the point of being able to accurately replicate voices of anyone with vocal recordings (podcasts, YouTube videos) in the public ether. It used to be that we believed something because we saw it with our own eyes, heard it with our own ears. In the coming years, even that won’t be enough.
Then there is the pornographic aspect that has regrettably already begun. Taylor Swift is the most famous victim of deepfaked images online but the exact same thing will soon be happening in classrooms up and down the country. In fact, it’s already started [11]. Compromising images of teenage girls are being created by AI and then spread amongst their classmates. Needless to say, this is reprehensible – and harmful in the extreme. How do you prepare a young girl for such psychological damage? Why should you have to? Because almost every new technology throughout history has been quickly turned into a weapon of misogyny. AI is no different.
Environment
AI models require an unconscionable amount of energy to train [12]. For all its hopes of being a tool of progress, artificial intelligence is an enormous resource consumer. Researchers are working to create energy efficient models but as of right now the AI revolution is quite literally unsustainable.
The responsibility of businesses
Regulation will be introduced in an attempt to minimise the potential damage AI poses. Indeed, in 2023, the Biden administration released an executive order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy AI and the European Union came close to passing its first comprehensive AI Act [13]. But Biden’s act is limited in its scope and authority, plus Silicon Valley will continue pushing back. As such, for the time being at least, if AI is to be effectively regulated, businesses will have to regulate it themselves.
Writing in Harvard Business Review, author of Ethical Machines, Reid Blackman, PhD, suggests some methods as to how. He says that organisations need to assemble “a senior-level working group that is responsible for driving AI ethics in your organisation…At a minimum, we recommend involving four kinds of people: technologists, legal/compliance experts, ethicists, and business leaders who understand the problems you’re trying to solve for using AI” [14].
Companies that fail to act now risk reputational damage and missed opportunities to build trust with customers and key stakeholders. This is uneasy ground; customers will feel kindly towards a company that’s prioritising high ethical standards.
What they won’t respond to are the businesses choosing instead to cash in on the chaos. As Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic, writes, “Corporations that stand to profit off this new technology are already memorising the platitudes necessary to wave away the critics. They’ll use sunny jargon like ‘human augmentation’ and ‘human-centred artificial intelligence.’ But these terms are as shallow as they are abstract” [15].
Self-regulation and ethics have never walked comfortably hand in hand, but until such a time as more official channels have a grip on this era-defining technological advancement, businesses must do so as best they can, with transparency and moral values at the centre of their thinking.
LaFrance sums the situation up well:
“In the face of world-altering invention, with the power of today’s tech barons so concentrated, it can seem as though ordinary people have no hope of influencing the machines that will soon be cognitively superior to us all. But there is tremendous power in defining ideals, even if they ultimately remain out of reach. Considering all that is at stake, we have to at least try.”
More on AI
AI: The Changing Face of Project Management
Source
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/Business/sam-altman-reaches-deal-return-ceo-openai/story?id=105091534
[3] https://www.reuters.com/legal/elon-musk-sues-openai-ceo-sam-altman-breach-contract-2024-03-01/
[5] https://hbr.org/2019/10/what-do-we-do-about-the-biases-in-ai
[7] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2024/04/addressing-equity-ethics-artificial-intelligence
[8] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2024/04/addressing-equity-ethics-artificial-intelligence
[11] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/02/opinion/deepfakes-teenagers.html
[12] https://www.forbes.com/sites/nishatalagala/2022/05/31/ai-ethics-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/
[13] https://www.pwc.com/jp/en/knowledge/column/generative-ai-regulation09.html
[14] https://hbr.org/2022/03/ethics-and-ai-3-conversations-companies-need-to-be-having
[15] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/07/generative-ai-human-culture-philosophy/674165/
Introduction
You’re the average of the five people you spend most of your time with. If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. Show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are.
These quotes, the first by Jim Rohn [1], second by Benjamin Franklin [2], and third an old proverb [3], tell you everything you need to know about the effect the people you surround yourself with have on your life and trajectory. Surround yourself with smart, hard-working people and – wouldn’t you know it – you want to be smart and hard-working too. Hang out with lazy, negative types and before you know if you’ll be lazier and more negative than the rest. They’ll grind you down, dull your ambition and dampen your spirit. Then, one by one, the doors to all those brighter futures you’d envisioned for yourself will soon close, lock, and disappear from view.
The right people
“In my twenty-eight years as an executive search consultant, working across all major industries in more than forty countries, I’ve discovered that the key to outstanding performance and fulfillment – both in work and life – is the ability to surround oneself with outstanding people,” writes Claudio Fernández-Aráoz in his book It’s Not the How or the What but the Who [4].
Fernández-Aráoz explains how the attitudes of our husbands, wives, friends, employers, employees, mentors and colleagues affect us profoundly – and as such, how the decisions regarding whom we allow to fill these positions are the most crucial ones we can make.
Research shows that the habits of people we spend time with rub off on us. When studying the health habits of people who live in so-called “blue zones” – regions of the world with notably high life expectancies – National Geographic fellow and author Dan Buettnerr noted that positive friendships were a key recurring theme [5].
“Friends can exert a measurable and ongoing influence on your health behaviors in a way that a diet never can,” he says. For example, in Okinawa, Japan, people form social networks called maois. These moais consist of a group of five friends who offer social, logistic, emotional and even financial support to one another over the course of a lifetime. The average life expectancy for women in Okinawa is 90 years old, the highest in the world.
It’s basic human nature. Your friend orders the salad, all of a sudden you’re a little more hesitant to order the stuffed crust Mega Meaty with extra pepperoni. Conversely, your friend orders chicken wings, cheesy chips, beer and tequila and the voice in your head telling you to get the salad, go for a run later, and maybe hit the library quickly turns to an inaudible whisper.
Because it’s not just about surrounding yourself with the right people. It’s about not surrounding yourself with the wrong ones.
The wrong people
In Living for the Weekday: What Every Employee and Boss Needs to Know about Enjoying Work and Life, Clive Swindall writes that, “While your success can be determined in part by whom you surround yourself with, it can also be determined in part by whom you choose to not surround yourself with…If you’re around someone with a cold, there’s a good chance you’ll catch the cold. What are you catching from the people around you?” [6]
Negative thinking, laziness, cruelty, arrogance, delusion, bitterness. How many bad traits can we put up with from those around us before we start to embody them ourselves? People who spend a lot of time together end up speaking the same way. Couples who’ve been together for decades end up looking alike. Owners even come to look like their pets. Of course if we spend all our time with the person who calls in sick for work, bad mouths everyone around them and lies in until 11am on weekdays, we’re going to start adopting some bad traits too.
As such, Swindall recommends people “do an analysis of your circle of friends and see whether they add to your life or take away from it.” It can feel harsh, but most of us have people in our lives with whom we have consistently negative relationships. We walk away from every interaction asking ourselves in exasperation, “Why am I friends with this person?” Perhaps it’s time to ask the question more seriously – why? Is it because you genuinely enjoy their company, find them interesting, find them interested in you, think they’d be there for you when it mattered? Or just because you’ve known them a while.
Swindalll is “referring to the people in our lives who drain us of our energy because they thrive on sharing their own negativity. Refuse it. Don’t just walk away from the negativity – run. Get as far away from it as you can. Not only does it impact our perspective with regard to our own lives, it impacts our mental health.”
It should be noted that he is not advising us to simply abandon friends at the first sign of trouble. Someone we know may be going through a tough time, may not be themselves, and as such may be difficult to interact with for a period. In those scenarios, of course our job is to be there for them and to help in any way we can – otherwise we’d be proving ourselves to be the kind of person no one else should want to surround themselves with. But we’re all aware of the difference between a good friend having a bad day, week, month or year and a bad friend who constantly drains us. Chances are you’ve had a name in your head the whole time you’ve been reading this.
Mentors
Mentors are the ultimate method of surrounding yourselves with the right people. Mentors can provide motivation, direction, coaching, training and advice. Are there people you admire in your chosen field? Reach out to them. It may be bold but boldness is often rewarded. You don’t have to set your sight for the top of the tree – Warren Buffet is unlikely to reply to your email – but if there’s a professor, boss or colleague you admire, a TedTalk that inspired you, a podcast that engaged you, or a LinkedIn post that roused you, why not reach out and see? People are kinder than we give them credit for.
Once you’ve tracked your dream mentor down, Fernández-Aráoz, writing in Harvard Business Review, advises that you are candid about the reason for your interest and that you ask specifically how to get started [7]. People like helping people who want to learn. As Nietzsche put it, “There is an innocence in admiration: it occurs in one who has not yet realized that [they] might one day be admired” [8].
If you think you’d benefit from a mentor but don’t have anyone in mind, head to conferences and lectures in your chosen field – even if you don’t make a mentor, you might meet a like-minded individual looking to do the same thing as you whom you can bounce ideas off; networking is always helpful. If you’re a University student or graduate, your University likely lays on alumni events that can help. Certain schools do the same.
If you can’t find a mentor or an event to inspire you, use the internet. The modern world allows you to listen to in-depth interviews with the best in business from pretty much every field in the world. Podcasts, YouTube, and LinkedIn are your allies. A wealth of knowledge is out there for you to soak up. Writing in Forbes, Jennifer Cohen refers to these mentors as the “friends in your head” [9]. Maybe for whatever reason you can’t surround yourself with inspirational people in your real life, but online you have no excuse.
Diverse viewpoints
When building the group you hope to feed off, ensure it is diverse, ideally in all aspects, but at least in thought. No matter how positive and talented your group is, if all you are doing is agreeing with one another, something is wrong. Having a plurality of ideas is essential. If your idea is not strong enough to survive being challenged, perhaps it’s not worth holding onto.
Similarly, when building out your network, the temptation is to make it one that demonstrates your strengths, but of far greater value is one that improves your weaknesses.
Research by Gianluca Carnabuci and Eric Quintane found that “the most effective way to unlock the full potential of your network is to maximize what we call “the complementarity premium” by building a network that supports you in areas where your cognitive style is not naturally suited. However, most people do just the opposite: They build networks that reinforce their natural strengths and this hinders their ability to perform at their best” [10].
We want to appear smart and talented. We want to be good. To do so, embarrassing as it may be, we have to expose some of our weaknesses first in order to make them better.
Surround yourself with the right people
Who we spend our time with matters. Traits and attitudes rub off. Spend too much time with someone else’s bad habits and you may soon find they’re your own. By asking yourself big questions, you can get an idea of the person you want to be, then assess those around you and ask if they’re going to help get you there. Obviously friendship is more than just a transaction – don’t abandon friends solely because they’re not stepping stones to the top. But there are likely to be people in your life that you know to be holding you back. Difficult as it may be, you need to ask yourself how long you’re going to let them.
Reach out to a mentor figure who inspires you, or if that’s not doable use “friends in your head” to keep improving. Be sure to develop your weaknesses and challenge your thinking from time to time. You need to take in all manner of competing perspectives. As John Stuart Mill put it, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”
More on Diversity
Diversity and Conflict for a Plural Workforce
Rethinking How We Work with Libby Sander – Podcast
Why Work Isn’t Working and Envisioning The Future Economy with Jess Rimington – Podcast
References
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/netapp/2015/03/31/success-tips-benjamin-franklin/?sh=12e59a7e4fe7
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/well/the-power-of-positive-people.html
[6] https://www.amazon.com/Living-Weekday-Every-Employee-Enjoying/dp/0470599405
[7] https://hbr.org/2018/09/the-key-to-career-growth-surround-yourself-with-people-who-will-push-you
[8] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/06/make-friends-you-admire-happiness/661245/
[10] https://hbr.org/2023/11/surround-yourself-with-colleagues-who-boost-your-performance
Introduction
Arthur Shopenhauer was a German philosopher best known for his 1818 treatise The World as Will and Representation, in which he posited, in short, that the world around us does not exist in itself, but is rather only a representation of the way we each subjectively experience it. Any objective reality, such that it exists, can never be witnessed or experienced by humankind due to the subjective nature of consciousness.
Writing recently in The Atlantic, Arthur C. Brooks, host of the How to Build a Happy Life podcast, argues that while Schopenhauer’s grand thesis may be what made his name, it is his other, lesser-known works which harbour greater wisdoms that we should each be incorporating into our day-to-day lives, especially if we are on the verge of undertaking a large, daunting project.
Brooks says Schopenhaur’s work “offered rules for living that stand up remarkably well when compared with the findings of modern research; they provide what has come, for me, to be the best guidelines for doing the big thing” [1]. By the big thing, Brooks refers to writing a book, running a marathon, learning to play piano, or any other such task that requires endurance and discipline.
The core arguments Schopenhauer made that Brooks champions are: embracing mindfulness, thinking of the big picture, living day-by-day, and blocking out external noise. By undertaking these practices, promoted by Schopenhauer in the middle of the 19th century, one can have a better relationship with their work today.
Mindfulness
Research at companies such as Google, Aetna and Intel have demonstrated that incorporating mindfulness into the workplace can decrease employee stress levels while improving focus, thoughtfulness, decision-making abilities and overall well-being [2]. Mindfulness has also been shown to reduce emotional exhaustion, increase openness to new ideas and develop compassion and empathy [3]. Modern procrastination scholars have also found that mindfulness significantly predicts the ability to avoid procrastination [4].
The benefits, then, are evident. And yet some sceptics still remain, because, as with anything in business, how people feel is considered less important than the bottom line. Except that incorporating mindfulness into the workplace has also been shown to be a money-maker.
As we have written about in the past, Aetna, a US health insurer that trained 13,000 employees in mindfulness practices, estimated an annual productivity improvement of around $3,000 per employee, as well as a reported reduction in stress levels of 28% [5]. Meanwhile SAP, a leading German software company, saw a 200% return on investment, based on data from a survey undertaken with the help of 650 SAP employees who underwent mindfulness training through the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI) [6].
In other words, mindfulness is no hippy-dippy fad. It’s a cold, hard cash earner.
Thinking big
All businesses, and indeed all individuals, need a north star, some destination to which we’re heading. Of course, there’s rarely a direct route or comfortable mode of transport that takes us precisely where we want to go – the journey tends to be messy, often necessarily so – but knowing where we want to end up helps keep us on track, and more importantly helps us see when we’re heading in the wrong direction. Having a big picture allows us to take little steps towards it. You put a puzzle together one piece at a time.
As Brooks puts it, “Each ordinary day, you have a choice: You can build your house up a little, tear it down a bit, or neglect it entirely. To choose the first option, start each day by envisioning for a minute your whole purpose and your desire to complete it. Then resolve to live this day in alignment with that desire. In the evening, briefly survey the day, notice where you perhaps fell short of your goal, and make a few resolutions to tighten things up tomorrow” [7].
It can be difficult to find the balance between big, end-destination thinking and the micro-decisions you need to get right in order to get there. It takes what Denise Russo, Global VP of SAP and council member for ICF CIO, terms “leadershift.”
Leadershift is “a balance between standing back and seeing the big picture (vision) and moving in close while painting all of the fine details (execution),” she writes in Forbes [8].
“There is a need to balance the excitement of envisioning the big picture alongside the plan for how to best get that picture painted,” she continues. “The best leaders focus inward first and then outward.”
Or, as Pabo Picasso put it, “Our goals can only be reached through the vehicle of a plan. There is no other route to success” [9].
Have a plan, have a destination – set it, know it – only then will you be free to focus on the collection of smaller challenges you must overcome to get there. Which, in turn, requires the next piece of advice.
Live in day-tight compartments
In his article on Schopenhauer, Brooks advocates embracing Dale Carrnegie’s advice to live in “day-tight compartments”. Carnegie was inspired to create this phrase by Sir Wiliam Osler, who in turn was inspired by the Thomas Carlisle quote, “It is not our goal to see what lies dimly in the distance but to do what clearly lies at hand” [10].
Perhaps, in combining the need for big picture thinking with the advice to live in day-tight compartments, we could amend this to: do what clearly lies at hand in order to reach the point that lies dimly in the distance.
A day-tight compartment – quite literally sealing off today’s tasks from yesterday’s and tomorrow’s – allows for greater focus, as well as making progress easier to measure. Make a list of what you need to achieve through the day in the morning, or perhaps plan for the entire week on Sunday night, and ensure that by the end of the day it is done. It really is as simple as that. Do not think about the task you’ll be completing in a week’s time or a year’s, there is no need. Focus only on what you can do in the here and now – the days will add up all on their own.
Block out the noise
The news is a distraction. The song in your head is a distraction. The neighbours’ shouting is a distraction. The world is a distraction.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, everything is a distraction. But that’s okay.
It can be too easy to let external noise – literal and psychological – mess with your routine and prevent you from getting things done. Now more than ever, the whole world is at our fingertips, the temptation to touch it is hard to resist. And yet, most times we do, it offers little to nothing in reward other than a cheap dopamine hit and massive delay to our daily progress. No one is going to lie on their deathbed and say they wish they’d scrolled more.
Blocking out the noise takes a bit of practice, but there are many techniques that can help. Many leading CEOs advocate time blocking, i.e. allocating arbitrary chunks of time to a specific task. Half an hour for emails here. Two hours for the presentation there. Whatever it may be. Indeed, actually setting a timer on your phone or using an egg-timer is a useful psychological trick that forces your mind into focus mode and allows you to switch off once time is up. During this time, fully commit to the task at hand. Turn off your phone. Make yourself unavailable on Teams. Be strict with your limits, and use an app like Rescuetime for assistance if you really want to track how it’s going.
One piece of advice CEOs endorse that can also be tied into mindfulness is rather more simple, passive even: simply allow the distractions [11]. That doesn’t mean jump on social media every chance you get. Rather, if the noise from the street or the table next to you at the cafe is bugging you, make the choice to not let it. Allow the world to happen around you as it is. If you can only get the work done under the perfect circumstances, you’re never going to get the work done at all. Step back, breathe, and rather than fixating on the imperfections, let them fade into the background. You’ll be surprised what you can achieve.
Schopenhauer and the workplace
So there you have it. Schopenhauer’s legacy as one of pessimism’s great philosophical minds who forced humanity to face just how detached from reality we are and always will be is undeserved. He was secretly just a productivity guru, a man ahead of his time, who if around today would be churning out SEO-driven LinkedIn content or life hack TikToks. (Before any enraged Schopenhunnies reach out, please be aware that was written with tongue firmly in cheek.)
But there are lessons to be learned in his teachings. Embrace mindfulness, think big, then once you know where you’re headed, get your head down and focus on the day-to-day, and be sure to block out external noise. Schopenhauer may have been writing in the 19th century, but good advice is good advice forever.
More on Focus
How to focus and become indistractable with Nir Eyal – podcast
Four Thousand Weeks: Time And How To Use It with Oliver Burkeman – podcast
More on Mindfulness
Mindfulness, Meditation and Compassion in the Workplace and in Life with Scott Shute – podcast
Awakening Wisdom: Exploring the Legacy of Tony de Mello with Dr. Francis Valloor – podcast
Sources
[2] https://hbr.org/2015/12/why-google-target-and-general-mills-are-investing-in-mindfulness
[4] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-66266-001
[5] https://www.bcg.com/publications/2018/unleashing-power-of-mindfulness-in-corporations
[10] https://dalecarnegiewaynj.com/2011/05/27/reduce-worry-by-living-in-day-tight-compartments/
Introduction
Manifestation is just one amongst a number of self-betterment practices endorsed by high-flying celebrities and budding social media presences alike. Simply put, it is the process of achieving something – often a personal or professional goal – through the power of thought. Via visualisations, affirmations and other similar techniques, one can, according to its champions, make their dream life a reality.
As Oprah Winfrey, one of manifestation’s most prominent advocates, put it to the class of Wellesley College in 1997, “Create the highest, grandest vision possible for your life because you become what you believe” [1].
Understandably, for every supporter of manifestation there is a detractor. Held up as a cousin or outright sibling of tarot reading, soothsaying and any other variety of pseudoscience, the notion that reality can be bent to one’s whims as if by Neo in The Matrix can be a hard pill to swallow.
But does that mean the practice should be disregarded altogether? Does manifestation really offer life-changing benefits? Is it yet more self-improvement snake oil? Or does the truth lie somewhere in between?
Let’s see.
The many faces of manifestation
The particular form manifestation takes depends on which advocate you speak to. Most favour some kind of visualisation technique, in which one dedicates a certain amount of time every day to picturing themselves in the life they want, the more specific the better – the house they live in, the structure of their day-to-day – in the hope that knowing what they want will allow them to then realise that picture of success. Affirmations are equally prominent, with people repeating mantras in front of a mirror about the person they wish to be in order to make that dream a reality.
There are many other techniques too. One can keep a file of positive reinforcement so that even on the down days one has a bible of sorts they can turn to. Then there is the 3-6-9 method popularised on Tik-Tok, in which one writes down what they want three times, why they’re manifesting it six times, and how the desire makes them feel nine times, all from the perspective of having already achieved their goal [2].
This perspective shift is often relied upon. Practitioners adopt the mindset of the future version of themselves that has already achieved their goals in the hope it will act as a blueprint for how to get there. Some techniques externalise this shift, insisting people dress like the version of themselves they see themselves becoming, adopting a posture that demonstrates power and confidence, and surrounding themselves with people who fit their vision.
A pre-fame Jim Carey would use visualisations early in his career and famously wrote himself a cheque for ten million dollars for “acting services rendered” with the expiry date set three years in advance [3]. Just prior to this expiry, he was paid ten million dollars for Dumb & Dumber.
The rise of manifestation
Manifestation is not a new phenomenon. As noted, Oprah was preaching its possibilities back in 1997 and Jim Carey cut his cheque in the early 1990s, but its roots stretch back further still.
Manifestation is thought to be born of the New Thought movement of the 19th century. Rather than being beholden to any particular religious tradition, it stems from an intermixing of teachings from Jesus, Greek philosophy, and pop psychology, amongst others [4].
Its move into the mainstream was helped by the likes of Oprah championing it for many years, but it was really during Covid that it became a phenomenon, in large part thanks to social media.
Google trends reveal that searches for manifestation peaked during the summer of 2020, evidencing the impact pandemic-induced lockdowns had on its uptake [5]. Lucie Greene, a writer and trend forecaster in New York, says this is not surprising. In the climate of unknowability the pandemic provided, “it’s cathartic to feel you have some control over your destiny.”
“For Gen Z in particular,” she notes, “it can be a form of self-soothing. It’s a way to make sense of things in a moment where nothing makes sense” [6].
Manifestation in action: the positives
Despite its naysayers, manifestation has actually been found to improve athletic performance in individuals even when they did not put in any physical effort [7]. Just rehearsing the movements internally was enough.
Indeed, within professional sports, manifestation is an oft-relied upon tool, with the likes of Lewis Hamilton and Stuart Broad singing its praises. Perhaps that’s not surprising – elite sport takes place at such a speed that athletes are often reliant on trigger movements and their mind’s ability to handle the pressure in the heat of the moment. Having played through the scenario before can only help.
One of the key upsides of manifestation is its resultant positive thoughts. By manifesting, and thus seeing themselves as successful, people are more likely to feel positive about themselves and their abilities, and as such generate further positive thoughts that bring further success. A cycle of mental positivity, like one of negativity, can be hard to break.
Manifestation in action: the negatives
Future self
In Harvard Business Review, Damian Walsh writes that manifestation “presents a pervasive philosophical and practical problem” [8]
By engaging in visualisations of our future self, or even adopting the perspective of this future self, we are living our life for a hypothetical person that can never truly exist. Philosophically speaking, by definition, the future self can only exist in the future – tomorrow is only a day away, and crucially always will be. As Walsh writes, “Those of us who hold a rigid and self-definitional vision of who we want to be, say 10 years down the line, may unknowingly be using the concept of our future self to understand who we are in the present, and this can be damaging.”
Defining yourself through the lens of an as-yet unachieved version can only play tricks with your sense of self in the present. Especially considering how feeble a grasp of ourselves any of us truly have – the person we want to be in our mind and the person we should be are unlikely to be one and the same. Ironically, then, in pursuing this idealised, non-existent future self, we may actually end up closing the door on real possibilities in the present.
“When you tether your sense of self to such specific goals,” Walsh writes, “you can unintentionally shut the door on a whole subset of possibilities or predispose yourself to not taking opportunities that might seem extraneous to your goals, even though, in reality, they are foundational to achieving happiness or professional prosperity.”
Moral quandaries
While presuming to have total control over our outcomes may sound like we’re demonstrating autonomy, it actually betrays narcissism, and can even have sinister undertones. To presume that all success is earned equally and that all failures were avoidable on the part of the unsuccessful lacks compassion and puts one in a precarious moral position – do the poor deserve their poverty, victims deserve their suffering, the sick deserve their sickness?
It takes a questionable moral character to answer in the affirmative to any of the above, but such thinking is the logical extension of manifest thinking – these people simply should have visualised better circumstances for themselves.
Self-absorption
This gets to the heart of many criticisms of manifestation: its self-absorption. The idea that the universe is working in tandem with your thinking to make life better just for you.
“It’s all about me,” said Dr. Denise Fournier, a psychotherapist in Miami who treats a number of 15, 16 and 17-year-olds in her practice. She adds that many of manifestation’s practitioners misunderstand the most basic community-driven, time-honoured aspects of spiritual living, instead asking “How can I use my spirituality to serve my own person?” [9]
Lydia Sohn, a writer and minister in California, writes in The Atlantic on the great difference between manifestation and prayer: “The practice of prayer presupposes that while we can express and pursue our preferences, we ultimately hand them over to someone with a perspective much broader and a love more generous than any of us can fathom” [10].
One can see the appeal for the manifester – they get to cast themselves as both the person making the prayer and the God who answers.
Manifestation in action: the balance
In truth, the greatest issue with manifestation is that people are doing it wrong. They want to use it as a catch-all approach in lieu of effort – a one-shot life hack. But drinking protein shakes isn’t going to transform your body unless you also go to the gym to work those muscles.
The American psychologist Mark Travers, Ph.D., says that these people often lack what is called “an external locus of control”, meaning the belief that their fate is decided by external factors [11].
Studies have shown that children who feel that they have the power to shape their lives (an internal locus of control) were less likely to have health complications in adulthood compared to those who felt the results would boil down to external factors (an external locus of control.) Children who felt they could shape their life simply ate better and were less likely to smoke or take drugs. While children who felt their life was the result of external factors acted accordingly, shrugging off the need to take responsibility for their choices.
A separate study showed similar results regarding the success of individuals at work.
“It seems people who have an external locus of control often fail to take the steps required to bridge the gap between where they are and where they want to be,” Travers surveys.
Manifestation is useful as a tool of inspiration – by actively making and taking the time to think about this future self every day, naturally the desire to work towards that goal seeps into the subconscious. Writing in the Irish Examiner, Bernard O’Shea observes that after practising a manifestation of flying a plane every day for a month as a thought experiment (he had no desire to be a pilot), he was dreaming about flying a Boeing 747 by his second week [12].
Translate that into something one actually wants to do – a writer who wants to write a book or a businessperson who wants to start their own business – and one can see how the practice allows their desire to feature more prominently in their mind, thus making them more likely to take active steps towards it. As Ms Sohn put it, “Manifestation is helpful to the extent that it gives voice to [our] desires. However, we mustn’t stop there.”
In sum
Essentially, then, manifestation falls short when one considers its more new age aspects and philosophical and moral shortcomings. That’s not to mention the hucksters charging large sums for their manifestation services with promises of life changing results, one of whom boasted to the New York Times, “You don’t have to have qualifications to be a manifesting expert…like singers who were born to sing, I was born to help people” [13].
But that doesn’t mean the practice should be disregarded entirely. Its great strength lies not in its ethereal, reality-bending magic promises but as a motivational tool, a way of making space for one’s goals in their mind so that they can then act towards them.
But it is the acting itself that is the important part.
As Gabriele Oettingen, a scholar and professor of psychology at New York University, writes in her book Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation, “Dreamers are not often doers…the pleasurable act of dreaming saps our energy to perform the hard work of meeting the challenges in real life” [14].
It is not the power of thought that will meet those challenges. It is the power of action.
More on Positivity
How Adopting a More Positive Mindset Can Transform Your Work
Optimism is a Force Multiplier
Stress Management and Leadership Through Mindfulness
More on Visualisation
The Power of the Subconscious Mind
Magic, Brain-Hacking and Performance with Keith Barry – podcast
The Science of Succeeding: Unearthing the Mental Keys to Endurance and Excellence with Karen Weekes – podcast
Adventure and testing new boundaries with Damian Browne – podcast
References
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7M1seIadZes
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/20/style/self-care/how-to-manifest-2021.html
[8] https://hbr.org/2021/09/stop-striving-to-be-your-future-self
[9] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/20/style/self-care/how-to-manifest-2021.html
[12] https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/people/arid-41310382.html
[13] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/20/style/self-care/how-to-manifest-2021.html
[14] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/20/style/self-care/how-to-manifest-2021.html
