Why upstream thinking is the key to corporate happiness
Organizational problems come in many and complex forms. In fact, with a little reworking, Tolstoy’s most famous opening line could easily apply to businesses: “All happy companies are alike; each unhappy company is unhappy in its own way.”
I’ve never found the will to sustain myself through a reading of Anna Karenina, but at different times in my life I’ve found myself reflecting on that quote. It sticks around because there’s a truth to it. All happy companies are alike. They have a clear and compelling vision, a strong culture, and they structure their systems in a way that develops the behaviours needed for success in their employees.
But creating a happy company is complex. There are billions, if not trillions, of tiny interactions and dynamics—within different teams, between competing budget centers, inside a competitive marketplace, as part of a community, or in connection to the overall ecosystem—that are incredibly hard to predict and manage.
Because it’s so difficult, most companies default to a state of firefighting. They tackle the most immediate problem in front of them, and often someone, or some team, emerges as the hero. But that doesn’t create a sustainably happy company. To get that, you have to solve upstream issues (i.e. prevent problems before they happen), not fight fires as they happen. And you have to be a system thinker. That means not only thinking about the system and how it could be tweaked to create the commonality necessary for corporate happiness, but also getting the buy-in and sustained action from multiple parties, probably from very different disciplines, to make it happen—because you can’t change a system as one individual.
(For a deeper understanding of the importance of upstream thinking, I heartily recommend reading ‘Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen’ by Dan Heath.)
Solve issues before they arise
This is the kind of issue we’re trying to fix for organizations at Attuned—to make upstream problem-solving a little bit easier. We created Attuned to help companies understand individuals by making the previously unseeable—Intrinsic Motivation—visible. But through working closely with our customers, we’ve found that our platform also has the power to help change the systems of companies, putting them surefootedly on that path to happiness.
Attuned works “upstream” by helping companies anticipate and solve organizational and team issues before they develop into fires that need to be fought, creating systems that allow businesses to thrive in the following ways:
A more accurate hiring system and stronger retention
Retention starts with astute hiring and a strong onboarding program. If you make mistakes here, you will always have a retention problem.
Attuned helps you hire smarter by giving you another, critical piece of the hiring jigsaw. Hiring for skills, experience, and behavior can be screened relatively easily, but how do you know what really makes someone tick? Or what their true values are? Or what choices they’ll make when they’re under pressure? The short answer is, you can’t—or rather you couldn’t in the past.
Now, by using Attuned, you can get an accurate view of people’s Intrinsic Motivators, the values that underpin their work, so you can see if these will fit well with the team and the manager they are joining. As the old adage goes, people join companies but leave managers. If a new hire and their manager have conflicting motivational values, and these are not mutually and clearly understood, it’s a recipe for turnover. Using Attuned as an important extra data point in your hiring process will thus significantly reduce your mishires.
Onboard faster and more effectively
For onboarding, Attuned acts like a time machine: since you can see from the Intrinsic Motivator Report what the dominant drivers are for your new team member almost immediately, it allows you to fast-forward through the weeks and months of trial and error that it used to take to really figure someone out.
Armed with this instant overview of a person’s motivations, you can predict what kind of messaging will resonate with them, what will get them excited and inspired, and how best to incentivize them. You’ll also be able to tweak your approach so that you can communicate with your new hire in the way that will have the greatest impact on them.
Rather than managing each person in terms of what works best for the “average” hire (an approach that, incidentally, led to a large number of planes crashing in the 1940s when they gave each pilot an “average” seat), you’ll be able to structure their job, assignments, and incentives in a personalized way—a depth of understanding that will allow your new hire to fly high from day one.
Create an atmosphere of psychological safety
Arguably the most important factor in increasing performance today is creating an atmosphere of psychological safety within your teams. This is an environment in which team members can feel comfortable raising problems and concerns without fear of retribution, and where people won’t hesitate to offer precious opinions that may just hold the key to success—or to avoid pitfalls.
As psychological safety is generally a team-level phenomenon rather than a company-level one, it’s important to be able to visualize the dynamics within a team that can create the friction that would prevent this culture from developing. By showing what drives each individual and how they prefer to communicate, Attuned helps managers do exactly this, opening up communication channels and providing the building blocks for a culture of psychological safety.
To be clear, psychological safety doesn’t mean creating an environment of comfort where people aren’t challenged—in fact, quite the opposite as you and your team will be continually challenged by frank opinions and unforgiving reality. And that’s a good thing.
Craft a culture of inclusion
The way human brains have evolved makes it hard for inclusion to happen naturally, which means it’s something organizational leaders have to craft intentionally. Whether it’s our need to feel part of a group, or our easy attraction to those like us, or Dunbar’s number limiting the amount of people we can reasonably keep track of and feel connected to, there are a lot of evolutionary developments working against us.
But if we want to live in an equitable world, a happier world in which those who are different to us are properly accepted and understood, then inclusion is a must. To get to inclusion, however, we must first pass through understanding, and this is where Attuned really excels, creating the conditions in which inclusion can flourish by providing the means to gain a deeper understanding of each individual.
That means being able to comprehend people at the most fundamental layer of their psychology, and appreciate them for the unique human they are, rather than just interpreting what you see on the outside.
Moving upstream
Humans are complex. We’ve barely begun our journey to understand how our psychology works, and we’re still in the early stages of figuring out the best way for us to work together to be happy and productive. Attuned is on a big, lifetime mission to solve this. Diversity is beautiful, and part of Attuned’s mission is to help build a world where the acceptance of individual diversity is the norm.
But when it comes to the happiness of organizations, commonality is key. And the first step to creating commonality is to move your thinking upstream; to make the shift from solving problems as they happen to creating systems that ensure these issues don’t occur in the first place. Attuned is here to help your organization and your teams take that first critical step on the road to corporate happiness.
Download The State of Motivation Report 2024. It’s free!
