Reclaiming purpose and aliveness (by Frederic Laloux)

Living and working in a state of cognitive dissonance.

Our children march for the climate; in private, many of us are deeply worried by what we hear about climate tipping points, forever chemicals, and collapsing ecosystems. Even if we tune out the bad news as much as possible, we can’t quite shake the fear that our and our children’s very future is threatened.

Likewise, many of us are staggered and worried by the ongoing erosion of our democratic systems. We watch the social fabric fraying under widening inequality, unsure of how to deal with our own relative privilege. Still more distressing, we sense that the organizations we work for, rather than helping to address these problems, too often neglect them, or even cause and accelerate them.

Yet in the workplace, there is little space for us to question or explore these concerns.

Somehow, we’ve settled for a business culture that asks us to push away any disquiet we may feel, and act as if these issues simply don’t exist, as if what we do during working hours has no impact in the real world.

And because so few of our colleagues seem to talk about these issues, we’re left believing it isn’t appropriate to do so—or worse: that no one cares. The culture of silence makes us afraid to be labeled as an “activist” or a “troublemaker” should we attempt to address what we care about.

But our silence comes at considerable cost.

By hiding our concerns from others, we often end up disconnected from them ourselves. We numb ourselves to the hardest questions of our time, silencing the inner voice that calls us to act on behalf of our care for the world. We become smaller than we are.

Deep inside, we long to make a difference. Something in us feels cheated when we’re asked to pursue hollow work. Little by little, we withdraw energy and commitment from our work, and often from our lives. After a while, we forget what it feels like when we are totally fired up on the job, totally alive in our efforts.

Cut off from intrinsic motivation, we are left chasing extrinsic metrics: budgets and targets imposed by shareholders or top management. We find ourselves estranged from the most potent source of aliveness: meaningful work that emerges from a deep sense of care.

In the end, this harms organizations as much as it harms us. Lack of engagement is the sad yet pervasive result that shows up, year after year, in engagement surveys. Throwing HR engagement programs at the problem rarely moves the needle much, because they don’t address the deeper conversation we need.

The courage to ask simple questions

Recently, I invited 15 CEOs of prominent companies to explore the question: where and when do you feel out of integrity with your company’s work? One CEO was candid enough to tell me, “You know, I’m not sure what you are asking us to do. I’m not sure what you mean by being ‘out of integrity.’”

I wasn’t surprised. I know how easily we silence the inner voice of integrity, because I silenced mine for years.

Until my young children reached the age—about six or seven—when they began asking the simple, disarming questions children ask.

In the supermarket, they wanted to know: “Daddy, why do they sell everything wrapped in plastic if plastic pollutes the world for thousands of years?”

Or, when I tried to explain that one reason organic food is more expensive is that retailers choose to make a higher margin on these products: “So, companies make it easier to buy harmful products and harder to buy things that are good for us and the world? That makes no sense.”

Or when we got to the cashier: “Daddy, why does the supermarket put candy everywhere at the checkout lines if they know this is bad for kids and will cause an argument for every family that goes through?”

I realized, quite suddenly, how much I had simply accepted.

Until my kids, without knowing it, pierced that comfortable acceptance—and I found myself struggling to justify what I had never questioned. And I struggled to explain that there was no obvious villain to single out. The “villain” is the larger competitive system we have helped to create and now find ourselves trapped in.

I shared my children’s questions with the group to try to reawaken in them that same capacity—to see things freshly, through the eyes of integrity.

One of them leads a global fashion brand, and I had seen their signature advertising campaigns in which an impossibly sexy woman is lying on the floor, the object of lust for a group of fashionable men gathered sinisterly around her. I shared my unease; statistically, there is a one-in-four chance my six-year-old daughter will become the victim of sexual abuse in her lifetime.

I asked the CEO: “I know that such ads are not unusual in the fashion industry, but I wonder how you feel, deep inside: are you OK with them?”

I also assumed, because it is the norm, that all companies represented in the room engaged in legal but complex schemes to minimize or avoid paying taxes. “I know this is what shareholders expect, but how do you feel about being the one who is overseeing this?”

Several companies represented in the room were in industries with most of their workforce on minimum wage—now so low in many places that workers must hold second or third jobs, or commute hours each day from areas with housing they can afford, and still worry endlessly about making ends meet. “These are your colleagues. I wonder: Do you allow the hardship of their lives to sink in and truly reach you?”

I made it clear that these are examples that would make me feel out of integrity; for them, it might be other issues.

My point was not to tell these CEOs what they should or shouldn’t think or do, but to help them reconnect with what they care about and stop numbing themselves to what they find disturbing. They, like all of us, have a right to live a life of wholeness.

We don’t need to have the answer

When I invite leaders, like this group of CEOs, to examine how they feel about their business’s practices, almost immediately, two fears surface—fears so potent they don’t want to engage with my question. The first is an instinctive fear: What if there is no answer to the problems I find disturbing? I wish I could pay people more, but I can’t—minimum wage is what it is, and competition is fierce. I wish we could avoid selling items wrapped in plastic, but what is the alternative?

As leaders, we are celebrated as problem solvers. For many of us, it is uncomfortable, almost unbearably so, to be confronted with questions that force us to admit we don’t have answers. The dissonance often compels us to ignore the hard questions and focus solely on the ones we know how to solve. But then we have it upside down. The true test of leadership is the capacity to sit with a hard question—no answer in sight—until answers begin to emerge. Sit long enough, and they almost always do.

This is how Ray Anderson, the late CEO of Interface, started the celebrated transformation of his company. Interface became famous for making the 20-inch carpet tiles you find in offices and public spaces everywhere around the globe. In 1994, at the age of 60, when the company he started from scratch was the undisputed global leader of its industry, Ray had a dark epiphany. He realized that his business, in essence, boiled down to extracting 1.2 billion pounds of raw materials a year—most of it oil and natural gas—and turning them into plastic fibers, and then into millions of square yards of carpet that, a decade later, would inevitably end up in landfills.

“I was staggered,” said Anderson. “I wanted to throw up. My company’s technologies, and those of every other company I know, in their present forms, are plundering the earth. This cannot go on and on and on.”

Anderson formulated a radical goal for his company: take nothing from the earth that is not rapidly and naturally renewable and do no harm to the biosphere in the production process. Not knowing how to go about it didn’t stop Anderson from engaging his executive committee. “What are we going to do, use hemp and wool?” someone asked. “Who’s going to raise our sheep?”

But answers emerged. First, Interface aggressively targeted waste reduction and used the savings—more than a billion dollars over the years—to finance its research into creating products from recycled and natural materials. This sparked a decade of innovation across materials, product design, production, and material life cycles. Today, the company is within reach of its goal of zero harm and closed-loop production, a feat unimaginable when Ray Anderson led with a question and no answer. All while the business continued to grow, landed on lists of best companies to work for, and earned recognition from every quarter.

Hard and stimulating questions, like the one that propelled Ray Anderson’s quest, are everywhere, waiting to be surfaced. There is one I’m reminded of every time I shave in the morning.

A few months ago, I learned in a blog post that if you shake off the water on your razor blades and store the razor outside the bathroom to protect it from dampness, the blade will last two to three times longer. I believe it: I’ve now used the same blade for months.

I keep pondering this question: If I were the CEO of Gillette, what would I do? With no effort whatsoever, I could cut my carbon emissions, my use of raw materials, and the landfill waste I generate by 50 to 80%! I just have to let my customers in on the secret. The trouble: it would also wipe out half of my revenue or more.

What would I do? Frankly, I have no idea. That is only natural.

I hope I wouldn’t sweep the question under the rug, could stay with the question until answers emerged. The alternative of avoidance comes at a high cost: living a divided life, part of us numbed to what we truly care about.

The importance of a plan B

The second fear is simpler to name: confronting the feeling of being powerless.

When the 15 CEOs grappled with the question of integrity, it triggered a second, excruciating fear – the feeling of being powerless. “I simply don’t have the power to change this thing where I feel out of integrity. Shareholders would fire me over this.” For leaders whose identity is bound up in a sense of power, it can be hard to accept that they are indeed very powerful in most domains but feel powerless precisely about the questions that matter most to their integrity.

The answer, I’ve come to see, is for these leaders to have a plan B. Suppose you act on your convictions—and are shown the door. What other pursuit would be almost equally (or perhaps more) fulfilling and interesting? Is there another role or industry you’ve wanted to explore for a while? An entrepreneurial venture that’s been calling? A cause that matters so much you wouldn’t look back on your current role.

If, like many leaders, you don’t have a plan B—if being asked to leave feels like ego death—then by definition, you are powerless today. There’s no way you will take any meaningful risk. But by finding your plan B, you’ve suddenly made yourself quite powerful. From that place of freedom, you can raise the hard questions that matter, build visions worth following, and take the risks needed to bring the visions to life. If someone pulls the plug, you’ll have no regrets: you’ve worked on something important, and you can activate plan B.

You don’t need to be the CEO. At Decathlon, the 80,000-person global sporting-goods manufacturer and retailer, I’ve met people at different levels of the hierarchy who didn’t ask for permission to roll up their sleeves for the environment. When Laurette, just 23 years old, got a job at the customer-service desk of a store in northern France, she was shocked to discover that many of the items customers return don’t go back on the shelves but end up in the trash.

A zipper is defective? Trash. The packaging looks less than spotless? Trash. The sole of a returned sneaker is less than impeccably white? Trash.

She contacted Mathieu, a comptroller in another store, and together they developed a concept to put such “second life” items back on the shelves at a 15 percent discount. Products that need repair are now sent to a nearby workshop and then put back on the shelves, too. It started small—391 items saved in the first 18 months. Now colleagues from many other stores have reached out to Laurette and Mathieu and the concept is spreading.

A few levels up the hierarchy, leaders of Forclaz, Decathlon’s brand for trekking, went all-in on sustainability. Lucie, a product engineer, would have walked out if she couldn’t bring her passion for the environment into her work: “How can we redesign all new and existing products to last longer, be repairable, and recyclable?” she wondered. “How aggressive does our CO2 reduction need to be for us to be in line with the targets set in the Paris Agreement?” Like Laurette, Lucie and her colleagues didn’t seek approval from headquarters; they set their own targets and got going.

But what happens if you push too far and are shown the door? It turns out, you might not need to activate your plan B, because even better plans can come your way. This is what happened to Nicolas Hennon. He was the CEO of a 10,000-person fast-fashion retailer with stores in Africa, Europe, and Latin America. Just 40 when he stepped into the role, Hennon had been in the industry long enough to feel troubled by how it often treats its workers. He set about transforming the company’s culture, making genuine autonomy, meaning, and deep listening the foundations of how people worked at every level. He co-wrote the company vision in a process that involved all 10,000 employees.

Like Ray Anderson, Hennon dared to say things as they are: “Our industry is the second most polluting of all, and it’s got to stop.” Countless initiatives to reduce, recycle, and redesign sprang up.

The results? Employee engagement soared; in a short time frame, 30 percent of garments had been redesigned with their full environmental footprint in mind (no small feat when the average item sells for €7.50); and the company outpaced its industry on revenue, profit, and share price.

Despite all this, Hennon was unexpectedly asked to leave. Board members had grown uncomfortable with his participative management style. What happened next was unlike anything I have heard of: a sudden outpouring of love. Within two days, Hennon received 1,400 messages of support and gratitude from employees, their spouses, and children.

Before the week was over, he was offered more than ten career opportunities, ranging from CEO positions to start-up founding partner, some of which far surpassed in meaning and possibility his plan B. Those opportunities came precisely because Hennon dared to follow his heart.

To me, it raises an intriguing question: Might your life trajectory turn out to be not only more meaningful, but also safer when you follow your deepest convictions and take risks, rather than when you play it safe?

The adventure of a lifetime

I like to ask leaders how many years they have left in their corporate life, then follow with a second question: How many more meetings will you sit in before it’s over? The groan—or the sound of weary laughter—is reliable. The question always lands. Something in the way we do business today feels lifeless. We long for more.

This makes me think a shift is closer than we imagine.

Right now, leaders who have the courage to listen to their integrity and turn hard questions into inspiring quests are still outliers. I hope that soon, the reverse will be true: those who lead from their integrity will stand out as the obvious leaders of our moment. And everywhere, talented and inspired people will gravitate to work with them.

Leaders who remain focused solely on financial metrics will seem increasingly narrow—frozen in a time when somehow it was expected that one would be content to spend one’s life force on nabbing a few points of market share from a competitor.

If you long to become the kind of leader with a quest that gives your work meaning, where can you start?

The best place, I believe, is to find a setting that feels safe enough to let your inner voice speak. For some leaders, this will be a conversation with a lifelong friend. For others, it might be with a loved one, a coach, or a peer in another organization.

Here are some questions to kick you off:

• What practices, although standard today in the industry, don’t sit quite right with me?
• If a six-year-old were to come and see all aspects of my business, what would surprise or upset her? What might I find hard to explain?
• What is one thing I could change in my industry that would make for a truly meaningful quest (even though it might seem impossible today)? What would make me truly proud?

Perhaps you’ll stumble upon something that feels both uncomfortable and alive—a sure sign you’ve touched something real. Share what showed up for you with the leadership team of your organization.

Invite them to inquire for themselves: Where do they feel out of integrity? What quest would root their work in aliveness and meaning?

Most likely, after some hesitation, a dam will break. Simply naming these things can feel like profound relief. Just like you, they may not have realized how they yearned to reconnect with a sense of wholeness, and to have their work grounded in a larger purpose.

When you see videos of Ray Anderson speaking or get to listen to leaders like Nicolas Hennon, you can’t help but notice their passion, the meaning that infuses their work, and the dedication and love they call forth in those around them. When we stop leading divided lives, we reconnect with a deep form of aliveness. But if we keep numbing ourselves to what we care about, we keep shrinking—living a smaller life than we are capable of.

We live in times that demand true leadership: toward the problem of climate breakdown, the collapse of biodiversity and ecosystems, the erosion of democracy, the shocking increase in inequality, the continuing marginalization of entire groups of people, and many other fiendishly complicated problems. This is the call for our generation, our hero’s journey.

Yes, a corporation should be defined by more than the value it brings to shareholders; it should be enlivened by the sense of purpose it evokes in its leaders and employees. When we reconnect with our integrity, when we pursue a purpose imbued with real power, we embark on an adventure for which only one thing is certain: now, we feel alive.

Three questions about your business’s license to operate

It can be uncomfortable to acknowledge that the way we conduct our business, in some aspect, feels out of integrity: our advertisement, or the tax avoidance; our environmental record; or the way women, employees on the front line or with minority backgrounds are routinely denied access to power.

It’s even more unsettling when we realize, like Ray Anderson at Interface, that the very nature of our business might be problematic or destructive.

Could it be that the world would be better off without our products or services?

This is not a conversation we are used to having—we often default to the view that whenever there is a buyer and seller, some value is created. But are we open to the idea that that value could turn out to be negative, once we include all forms of externalities?

I’ve come up with a simple, three-question test that I find provocative and helpful to discern whether or not our business activity serves the world. What would happen to our sales…

1. ... if no marketing and advertising was allowed?
   Part of our economy relies on continuous advertising to create needs where none exist. It convinces us that something in our life is lacking, that we are somehow broken unless we buy this or that product that will finally make us whole. Say we are a soft drink producer and our sales depend on us pumping in hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising every year to create demand that would otherwise not exist. Does the world really need what we sell?
2. … if customers had to watch a five-minute video showing how our product or service is made (and disposed of)?
   Let’s continue the example. What if the customers of the soft drink we make were to see all that goes into our product? How sugarcane mono-crop farming destroys soils and forests and pollutes rivers? How workers on plantations are treated? How in some places, pumping for water depletes water reserves that other people critically depend on? How we engage in lobbying practices, often covert, to avoid people being protected from the ill health effects of our drinks?
3. … if our sales prices reflected the full cost to society?
   What if the price of a bottle of our soft drink included the health care costs of obesity, diabetes, and early death? And the living wage for everyone in the value chain? What if the plastic we use for bottles was priced at the level it will reach in a few generations when fossil fuels run out and we realize how incredibly valuable they are? What if we had to pay to recover every plastic bottle bearing our logos from the ocean? When all this is included, what would be the retail price of a bottle of soft drink, and would anyone still buy it from us?

These are uncomfortable questions!

So uncomfortable, perhaps, that your mind just reached for rationalizations. What about the jobs my company creates? Or: What about the government and customers—don’t they bear some of the responsibility too? Or: Everybody in the industry does this, so what’s the big deal? And anyway, what would the solution be: do you suggest we forbid products like soft drinks?

If a question like this popped up for you, I invite you, whatever the merit of the question, to see it as a technique your mind grasped at to make the discomfort go away. Rationalizations offer short-term relief but come with a longer-term cost: that of keeping us from being in touch with what we truly care about. They maintain us in a state of numbness; they keep the lid on our inner voice of integrity.

My invitation is this: can we shake off our numbing, can we allow, even just for a few minutes, to feel how these three questions affect us? Can we sit with the discomfort these questions create and feel how, at the same time, something in us might be grateful that we are creating a space to reclaim our integrity?

Somewhere deep inside us is a part that might be ready to face these questions courageously and help us discern whether our business, in its current form, meets the standards of our care and deserves our full participation.