First my interest in studying happiness led me to attend the First World Congress of the International Positive Psychology Association based around the first MA course set up Marty Seligman of Penn State, whose book, Learned Optimism, I always highly recommend). The inexpensive, well-attended (1500) conference was great and all the ‘who’s who’ of Positive Psych presented – Diener, Haidt, Fredrickson (many of whom I’ve mentioned in posts previously) and many others, some known, others not so much. An amazing amount of research has been done in 10 years of the concept’s short life and a number of countries have actually absorbed the general principles as a way of measuring the success of government policy. After all, what is the purpose of government if not to create the environment for happier lives. Perhaps this is even a concept business might look at. We know for a fact that happier employees are more productive. More on this as we go forward.

Second, I spent considerable time thinking about why I don’t post more. And concluded, not totally surprisingly, that I only feel like doing so when I think I have something of value to say. What a novel concept. Of course, it’s very personal since, like most sites now, there is some unknown, potentially large number of people who MAY be reading some of this, but typically a lot fewer than 1% comment, so you have no real measure. Perhaps there are thousands of people out there just dying to hear everything that pops into my head. Somehow I pretty much doubt that. If so, I apologize, but you’re always welcome to let me know.

In the mean time, I will stick to my new timetable – whenever something is significant in my opinion. I’m not in this to pump out posts every day or attract business or a huge following, but to see if ideas can evolve into useful forward movement. With so many blogs and discussion groups desperate for readers, attention and significance, I’m happy not to compete every day. It will either add up to value in the long run or it won’t. Over time the Internet needs better ways to help people locate material of true interest to them. Maybe then the right people will find what they need here. In the mean time I’ll keep at it. occasionally.

Third, this coincided with some thinking about ‘full retirement’ whatever that might look like. I concluded that for me it probably looks like what I’m doing – bits of this and that – work, volunteering, travel, etc., all melded together. My idea of great travel was going to the conference, for instance. And I’m blessed with a spouse who is happy to tour those towns on her own and then guide me to the best parts we can share together.

My main conclusion was I should stop soul-searching about all of it – the ‘worry’ was a drag and I enjoy the stuff I do. While I don’t market, the work coming in is just fine. I like to be engaged and hopefully always will be, but not at the expense of a strenuous sales effort. Again, either people are interested or they’re not. Wouldn’t it be great if the world could work this way for everyone. It’s great that people write about what they and others are doing and keep us aware of new products and services. We all want to hear about things we think might improve our lot, but. do we really want the hard-driving sales ‘attack’ that so many businesses feel they must keep up?

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Two in particular come to mind this season. Vertex One, an unusual Canadian investment company, always sends an unusual book to its clients. This year: A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage. His “first glass” describes plausibly how beer likely was one of the great forces pushing humans to create cities, leaving behind 150,000 years of wandering in hunter-gatherer bands virtually overnight a mere 10,000 years ago. From there we’ve evolved the amazing science, technology and organizations that offer us totally different lives today. Yet beer continues to exert an influence. Such time scales change the way we look at our present, miraculous information evolution in less than a generation via the Internet. I would never have thought such a book would be worth reading, let alone the source of numerous amazing insights.

That led to recalling the phrase “remember how unlikely is your birth” – each one of us being entirely unique. Shaped by millions of interwoven circumstances, we’re both significant and amazingly insignificant in the grand flow of time and the universe. This is a line from a Monty Python song from one of my favorite movies, highly irreverent “The Meaning of Life,” mostly forgotten in the daily flow of minute by minute.

It’s one of those ‘you have to see it’ things. Fortunately you can, though whether it should be legally free is another puzzling question from our instant communication revolution. It’s here on YouTube via Stumbleupon, another Canadian success story.

The best part of holidays for me is the time to ponder the imponderable. I’m always glad to get back to practical challenges, but with a new perspective. Have a great new year!

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The answer unequivocally is yes. While it may be obvious that you ought to be able to achieve this, it clearly isn’t obvious how, since the McKinsey & Company survey presented by their head of North America (partial data here, more more data here) confirmed once again the long known fact that most mergers and significant changes fail. Only a third of all transformations succeed well or extremely well and major change tends to be even worse on average.

If you had to leave early you’d be forgiven for thinking this is old news, though always useful to know if it’s changing. And it seems to be… slightly. The study was useful in distinguishing types of change, some being harder than others, and especially for identifying what it takes to succeed and pitfalls. It was very interesting to hear these backed up by real experiences of the panelists who represented major organizations: a bank, a telco and a large hospital.

What was most interesting was to see the use of ‘complexity science’ language to describe what’s needed. Positive Deviance describes the process of looking for an example that is unusually successful and then using that to discover what works and why to replicate it. It’s a scientific advance especially in human behavior matters that again should be totally obvious, but isn’t. It’s been used with amazing results in situations as diverse as ending plagues in Africa to avoiding antibiotic resistant infections in modern hospitals (health care has been particularly active using it, but it fits in any industry).

In general what turned up was that all these organizations are using the knowledge gained from research and data more and more when it comes to managing people – again obvious, but late in developing. Many senior leaders wouldn’t think of ignoring market research or financial facts, but blithely used to toss aside scientific discoveries in the HR/people management field because "they know how people behave." After all, don’t we all. We’re people; we’ve watched people manage well and poorly for years, so of course we all think we know. Yet the success rate of keeping people engaged shows otherwise. It was gratifying to hear from such senior people in major organizations that more weight is being given to actually learning from research. I will likely find more to say over time about this particular event, which made a lot of points concretely visible. Great work!

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This is how the world has progressed as far as it has and the only way for such a complex mechanism to progress further.

Now that we know this is how progress is achieved we can rest easy that progress is still possible… once enough leaders recognize the limits within we must all work and the opportunities for novel solutions within those limits.

We’ve solved the great puzzle of figuring out how to improve the world… at least in theory. Now we have to, we ALL have to, put it into practice by exercising leadership toward a common purpose. Survival of our best social results will do for a purpose. So let’s go. If it helps we need to do more of it; if it doesn’t we need to stop it. No mystery what the strategy is. As usual the ultimate challenge is putting it into practice and over-coming the hurdles we encounter as we go.

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