Totem Poles, !Kung bushmen, the Love Economy, and you

Chris, with the Raven-Whale-Eagle team

Chris tweeted a picture of a totem pole this weekend, pointing out (via a link to Wikipedia) that the term “Low person on the totem pole” is a bit misguided–the figures on a totem pole are not, in fact, arranged hierarchically. Wikipedia also points out that the figures aren’t “idols” either. Both concepts, that of hierarchy and that of idol-worship, are but assumptions we bring to what we see.

This got me thinking: if we naturally assume that anything arranged vertically is a hierarchy, and that any figure is an “idol,” what other assumptions are we bringing to the teams we work in?

The economist Hazel Henderson questions our very definition of what constitutes “work” in our culture, claiming that because we have traditionally left women’s activities out of our definition of economy, we are leaving a great deal of human endeavor out of our equations. Henderson claims that we fail to count “50 percent of all useful products and services in even industrial societies which are unpaid and largely produced by women, including volunteering, caring for the young, old and sick, household management, do-it-yourself housing, food-growing, and community service.”

You can even find these assumptions embedded in how scholars study work. The anthropologist Richard Borshay Lee authored a rather well-known study of the !Kung bushmen, a hunger-gatherer society, and he concluded that the !Kung only “worked” 20 hours per week. But what did he define as work?

“The main kind of work the !Kunk do is subsistence work: hunting and gathering. A proportion of their total time is also spent in manufacturing and maintenance of their tools, clothing, and housing. Most observers would have little difficulty considering these activities as work…. When a hunter consults the oracle disks, is that work? When he spends the evening in a camp listening to reports of game signing on the eve of a hunt, is he working? Because these activities are carried out in a socially pleasurable context, I have not considered them as work.”

Lee also excluded things like cooking, and child-rearing.

Lee goes on to say that if one did choose to count these other activities as work, then the !Kung worked as much as any other people. What I like about this example is that it points up another of our assumptions: that work is something that must be unpleasant, while leisure is pleasant.

Henderson would say that this world view evolved from a culture that based its idea of organized work on warfare. (And competitive team sports, I might add.) She says that what she calls a Love Economy would value these feminine and/or pleasurable pursuits as foundational to the global economy. She created the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators to bring these factors into our reckoning. The “dimensions of life” described include: education, employment, energy, environment, health, human rights, income, infrastructure, national security, public safety, re-creation and shelter.

My question to us is: how can we create more sustainable workplaces by incorporating these same kinds of “dimensions of life” into our teamwork? At the broadest level, that would mean including things that literally “sustain” the team in our definition of work.

Thinking of this in personal terms, I found some resonance. I often focus on rather housewifely tasks around the office, and often discount their importance as work: As I blogged recently, I am the Decorator-in-Chief. When I cook a big lunch for everyone on the day we gather for our monthly retrospective, I am enjoying myself, and I am also feeding people–something we might otherwise pay a caterer to do professionally–but I have rarely considered it work. Yet having a pleasant place where we can share a meal, and a meal to share in it, does contribute to the cohesiveness of our team. I’m also making more time to blog–to think, read, reflect and compose, another activity without a measurable ROI, I caught myself at 7:00 am wanting to hurry writing this blog post before the “real” workday began!

But there is another level at which people in the software industry at large pervasively fail to consider some vital functions as “real” work: meetings, testing, reflecting, pairing. We tend to have a factory mentality in which only the actual production of code is “real work.” Agile aims at correcting this course, which is why its principles, values and practices have ramifications beyond software.

And about the pleasure principle: Chris came back from a recent client engagement full of enthusiasm–he said he’d been utterly delighted by the whole experience. Now, we do measure Agile Learning Labs’ success in dollars and cents, but Chris founded this company not because he wanted to profit, but because he wanted to create a cool company and sustain himself and others doing work we are passionate about. So couldn’t we count delight as a work product? For that matter, couldn’t we consider delight as work? Try grokking that one!

Maybe in addition to having a “definition of done” every team should create their own “Quality of Life Indicators.” What would yours include?

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