Moving from Alchemy to Chemistry
Here are a series of articles that explore the important idea that our health and development is affected by our social environment. The prevailing social environment is of course, the Workplace. Just as with parenting, the most damaging types of environment are Authoritarian and Permissive and the ideal is Authoritative.
Here you will find the new emerging science that I think will revolutionize health. For just as 150 years ago poor physical work conditions were the primary drivers for poor health, so today poor cultural work conditions affect millions of people and drive an epidemic of depression, cancer and disease. My belief is that just as a massive program of public health, and not medicine, made a large difference in clearing up the Victorian problems, so our understanding of the managerial relationship as being the key to workplace health will do the same for our own time.
My special thanks to Brian Chambers who funded much of this work in his role in Veterans Affairs in Canada as we did our best to understand stress in the Canadian Forces.
Chapter 1 - The Vice - The Pressure that is bearing down on the workplace
Chapter 2 - The Secret is Found - The Pathway and the Managerial Relationship
Chapter 3 - Discovering the Power of The Facilitator - The Holder of Trusted Space
Chapter 4 - Discovering Col. John Boyd - The Mind as the Battlefield
Chapter 5 - Discovering BP - Giving the People a Voice Inside Trusted Space
Chapter 6 - Summary - Voice, Mind, Culture, Facilitation and of Course Trusted Space
I am satisfied that work at CIBC, the US Army and at BP has established that with the right leadership and using the principles of Trusted Space, a conventional organization can make progress.
But the prevailing culture is so strong that when the leadership that intiated this work and protected it was gone, then the work died and the waters closed back over. So we still have a long way to go - but the way is known and the experiments have been large enough and have been replicated. The Science is proven.
Now the task is the same task as with all breakthroughs - how do we take a novel idea that will be resisted by the status quo and make it commonplace?
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