The New Business Writing

"The twenty-first century will be anything but business as usual. Institutions must now balance the need to make a living with a natural ability to change. They must also honor the souls of the individuals who work for them and the great soul of the natural world from which they take their resources. But finding the soul in American corporate life is blessedly fraught with difficulties."  – David Whyte, from The Heart Aroused




A very interesting statistic is found on Jack Appleman's blogpost discussing psychological investment in company of the modern American worker – that only a third, it had been found in a poll, are engaged in their jobs. Either this tells us something nearly unbelievable about modern culture and work, or it is, and has been, accepted as some kind of truth of the way it always has been. My guess is that former more likely, on balance, the correct notion, and even though, of course, the latter might have always been true to some degree, I do quickly wonder about the difference of investment of the farmer, say, from a hundred and fifty years ago who essentially had to 'become the land' in order to both nourish it and receive nourishment, and a farmer of today, who hustles about from managing one large piece of machinery to the next, who doesn't really know where her product comes to land, and spends most of her time sweating the prospect of coming debt. The first example, without romanticizing, had to have hands on plants and seeds, had to tend to milk cows at night after dinner and might have known cow number three by name, and tended to the soybean supply because his best friend would be picking it up in a month to distribute it among other friends.  This very simple example could quite easily be transferred over to the business world; we have to assume that some of those very tissues of investment, of dream, of care, of purpose have also there eroded as the statistic above suggests. In this way, business is running at about half-productivity, really, with only one eye on the work itself, and another larger more wanting eye is on something else entirely. And what is this something else is one of the questions that Whyte asks in his book the Hearth Aroused. The transformation from a publicly driven culture to a private one has taken its toll, no doubt, on the over behavior and care in the workplace; to regain at least another third of the worker's attention might very well be one of the more effective programs any small or large business could conduct. Imagine if the statistic evolved to two thirds, and that the worker spent 75 percent of themselves in their work as they were working compared to 50 or even 25. Attention spans have diminished for many reasons over the past 20 years; the standard culprit we point to is the fact that we are surrounded with more external distractions than any other time in human history – it would be very difficult to argue out of this point. A modern worker could, depending on the type of job he or she has, spend an eight hour shift with their minds on all of the various options that show up either on phone or on screen while doing whatever task is at hand.  In years past, it is true that the worker could be thinking about other things, relationships, issues, dreams for much of the day, but never has there been such a tantalizing onslaught of visually, temporarily entertaining options. Conversations might very well rally around the distraction more likely than the work, hence the one-third engagement claim from above. Answers?

Theories of multiple intelligence tell us that we are not, and never have been, one-dimensional creatures who merely portray one set of interests and capable of achieving one set of tasks. For all who have interacted closely with an introvert either at home or at work, for example, has come to realize that he or she might very well be the most articulate person in the room that morning, a true leader, organized, bright, engaged; but that if that same person is asked to give that same presentation later in the day, or again the next morning, something, some energy that seems imperceptible, drops off, loses momentum. We assume many things about this drop off, but how often do we accept both the brilliance and the 'fading away' of this particular person. What we don't fully understand, perhaps, is that this person is now also considerably brilliant in her own private work, quietly, diligently and constructively. Maybe she is 50 or 75 percent engaged, if she is accepted. Rejections of her personality, her introversion, will diminish her abilities by a considerable amount. What would happen if this particular worker was now engaged in a learning platform, at work, in which her other side is engaged, allowed to perform, but quietly from behind the scenes. What if she was involved in spearheading a topics blog post for the office workers? What if, a varying times in the day, groups of workers were engaged in secondary learning on other topics which maybe, just maybe, they were allowed to choose? What if there was an ongoing writing class that wasn't necessarily just about business but about topics in nature, poetry, multiple intelligences. In the domain where we had been losing two thirds of our workers to lack of engagement, has just been reharnessed. What if, as we take this example down along its farthest reaches of the imagination, business of fair size had continuing education agents built right into their hires?  The mind that used to hunger for some disruption through the use of the next phone app, might now gravitate toward the topics courses. Purpose is reengaged in the job not because the worker has been confronted with the one dimensional motivation of monetary reward (of course this could work for many as well), but because now the job and the workplace is associated with something that is both separate (the topics course, writing, teaching, etc.), but connected to the job.  At the end of this particular day, will the worker go home and enthusiastically bring up one more detail about the task they are hired to perform, or will it bring up details about the history of restoration projects ongoing in the local area? Write your interests on pieces of paper, toss them in the hat, and we will take a look at them at some point for a very casual 'cover discussion,' at lunch. Let's write about that, nice and easy, maybe a mere shared email format to begin. Maybe it is brought up that there are place to participate in the very thing that we are discussing on saturday morning. On monday, what did you find out? Through all of this, it has to be understood that purpose and mission constitutes a large part of the ability of the multiple intelligence models of mind. The inherent, deeper, more psychological components of the mind must be satisfied alongside of the precise job that is being asked for. Let's say that older more traditional values used to fill up that space and time. It seems safe to say, and we can leave it here, that people had more connective psychological tendencies in days when, frankly, there just weren't quite as many choices of lifestyle and belief as there are today.  Now it is the very pursuit of disparate modes of engagement that is the potential system of connectivity. To see that workers come from all different modes of living and belief systems can be the very commonality that could be used to reshape purpose.

The new business writing, then, is not necessarily about grammar, editing ability, even succinctness (although, again, these are positive features of writing), but instead it is an ability to take on side topics that at first seem dissimilar to the business at hand, but that allow for individual interests and expressions to become collective interests and expressions. Poetry in the workplace has a foreign look to it at first glance, but poetry is a very immediate mode of expression which draws from, by near definition, all sorts of avenues of the intelligence. In other words, poetry reflects the state of the modern mind far more fully than the one-third engagement level of the task oriented workplace.  Human being today crave psychological purpose more than any other thing in American culture. To be associated with a particular brand, bright and shiny by logo, popular by peers, will last only a short while for most compared to the engagement of all that resides underneath the veneer of the logo. We can't expect workers to take these initiatives up by themselves; owners, managers, leaders of all kinds need to create these avenues of 'in shop education.'