002 - From Taylorism to Trust: Rethinking Work’s Old Rules with Mike Parker

What happens if we dare to tear off the mask of professionalism and actually risk showing up for real? I'm your host, Myriam Hadnes, and this is Unprofessionalism.

This code for old white guys always get promoted.

Professional is the code word.

Yeah.

Yeah. Why didn't you speak about that on the podcast?

Because there's so much to say about it. I think we just grazed the subject of how oppressive professionalism can be for minority groups, particularly neurodivergent people, women, people of color, so on and so forth. Oh, they can't be professional. Taylorism originated from somebody who had a scientific system of putting together an army for war. And that's one of the reasons why all our business speak is riddled with war metaphors. So this professionalism fits into that somewhere along the line as well. You think about what people say, even in academia, sometimes, especially in academia, I shot down their point. I defended my PhD.

Welcome to the show, Mike Parker.

Thank you for having me.

And I'm very glad to have you on the show today to discuss unprofessionalism.

That's a good subject.

Yes, it is. From the focus of not knowing, before we go there, we start with the same question. When has being air quotes, unprofessional turned out to be the smartest move you or someone around you ever made?

I, well, there were lots of different incidents, but I think the one which stuck out in my mind was, uh, when a team of us were installing the first ever Tandem Base 34 system in South Africa. There was a project manager there and we were all working incredibly hard and it was a team of very bright people. all very lively, very wired, bright people working on the project. And I think at the time this game had just come out called The Immense Machine, which ran on Windows, on laptops and stuff like that. And it was a fascinating game because it actually involved physical principles and you had to put together these machines out of components and make them do things. And somebody brought one into the office where everyone was working, coding and configuring stuff and testing and so on. And the whole, the whole gang of people, the whole team just stopped and gathered around this thing. And I think for the next 2 or 3 hours, they didn't do anything except this game, The Immense Machine. The project manager actually joined in. He didn't say anything at all except, oh yeah, no, I think that bit can go there, or that bit can go there. And much later he said, you know, everyone's working so hard and an incredibly creative game. And it was clear to me that simply not to worry about the idea that we might be technically losing a couple of hours' time Because the amount that it would do for morale would repay that 4 or 5 times over easily in the next few days, which is exactly what happened.

Beautiful. And what a beautiful leadership lesson to learn.

Yeah, it was good.

What did it teach you?

It taught me that when you have a team of very highly creative people, they will quite often go off on tangents for a little while because it's just in their nature. That's in the nature of creative people a lot of the time. And creating an atmosphere where that is taboo or unprofessional is a good way of losing really good people because they just feel stifled and it shuts down their creativity.

And what's the impact of stress in that?

It's interesting, I think, that if you try to stop somebody, a creative person, for example, from daydreaming occasionally during the day, then you will actually massively increase their levels of stress. And that produces more adrenaline, it produces more cortisol. And it effectively starts shutting down the higher brain. So they can't do their work as well.

So we're compensating air quotes professionals, experts to do productive work, putting them under stress that actually avoids them to achieve that and considering daydreaming unprofessional because they're not productive, but it's just Over the surface and productive?

I think the problem is that professionalism, I think, tends to encode the idea that unless you are centered in your active task-focused mind all the time, then you're not actually doing anything constructive. And in reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

What do you mean by that?

So task focus, your task focus is great for doing particular things and responding to stimuli from your environment and engaging with other people and having meetings and phone calls and stuff like that. But the other side of your nervous system, parasympathetic nervous system, when you calm right down, you're not doing anything in particular and you start to daydream or something like that, in a similar kind of state. The default mode network becomes a lot more active, and that is now in some research, it's being cited as being causal in creative thinking. So those periods of time when you might see, you might find yourself or see your colleagues gazing blankly out the window, that doesn't mean they're not doing anything. It means that they're doing something in a different brain state. And that brain state is actually a significant contribution to solving for very complex problems, apart from other things.

And I'm just thinking of how nowadays we often take shortcuts using AI in the deep thinking process, believing that it will accelerate the thinking, but then it even takes more time or might even distract us from these deep creative thinking moments. Because we are keeping ourselves busy and recalibrating the AI to come up with something that is helpful.

Yeah, I think a lot of it depends on how you use AI. Really does. And I can't remember the name of the book off the top of my head, but I can look it up later. Somebody wrote a very interesting book on how to use AI for actually expanding possibilities. Not for replacing chores, not for doing more quickly what we've always done, but for actually being able to cover many more possibly divergent paths of possible solutions. So instead of saying, okay, so I would normally approach this like this, and now AI, I want you to do that same as me, but much faster. You can say to it, okay, what are 10 different ways of approaching this that I might never have thought of? And then you're engaging with AI as a tool which you can use for potentially augmenting the depth of your thinking and the depth of your inquiry into a particular problem and expanding the number of possible solution paths.

It's a beautiful use case. And at the same time, the thought crosses my mind, why not doing this with our team members? It might cost more time, but it might also create more connection. So the—

Why not? Let's do both. Have team members who are also working Yeah. In that way with AI so that the intrinsic intuitive power that humans have that AI does not have can be multiplied.

Yeah.

I think AI is capable of taking away a lot of intellectual legwork as long as you check it, of course, because we all know how much it lies. And that means that there's more space and more time for us to behave, to follow our intuitive and less reductionist skills.

Yeah. I was also thinking of what you said before in the, um, the nervous system, um, and how stress affects us and then our creativity. And then I was thinking of the phrase, I don't know. So when we don't know, we can turn to AI and ask it. It comes up with all the answers. We can turn to our team and say, I don't know, and engage them. And so the way how I imagine it, and I would be curious of your perspective, is when I say, when I know that it feels safe to say, I don't know, my nervous system relaxes.

Right.

And I'm making space to see opportunity. When I feel anxious and I say, I don't know, I cramp and I don't hear anything, but I just want to run. So what makes it feel so dangerous to say, I don't know?

I think what makes it feel dangerous to say, I don't know, is the deep underlying sense that everybody has to be in competition with everybody else.

Hmm.

So a certain amount of friendly competitiveness is one thing, but when that becomes competition for survival, so if I say, I don't know at this point, does this now start becoming a threat to my job? That's, I think, when the problem arises. That's when the amygdala is kicked off. Because being cast out is a death threat as far as the amygdala's concerned. So seriously losing status within a group that you are dependent on for your survival is a real fear.

And in a previous podcast recording on workshops work, you spoke about the fear-driven organizations. that most of the organizations are fear-driven. So what is in such a context then the cost of saying, I don't know? Is it the outcast?

In a fear-driven, and I think it's a question of degree because all of us are subject to more, some anxiety and some fears about our security and our worth and value and so on. But I think that when that is very prevalent in an organization, so punishment is a bigger driving motive than reward, for example, then it's very difficult to get people to say, I don't know. It's very difficult to get people to say, hey, I made a mistake and I know what went wrong with that process. They won't. I have a story which I think may be apocryphal or it might be true. Somebody who was actually responsible for guidance systems for sea-to-air missiles, and they were testing a bunch of them. And I think they were like $3 million each or something like that. And they fired one and all the top brass were there watching. They fired one and it went off out over the ocean, cartwheeled and exploded in midair. And the guy who'd written the code said, um, later anonymously, I looked at it do that and I thought to myself, hmm, That looks just like what might happen if I hadn't loaded all the microcode. I did load all the microcode, didn't I? Oh my God. Oh my God, I didn't. Shall I tell them? No. So they fired the other 3 and the same thing happened. So, but within that environment, within that environment, he was frightened enough for his own survival not to actually say anything about it.

Wow.

So that's, I think, a really dramatic example of—

Yeah. And that's the example that they often cite, or similar examples of the value of psychological safety.

Yeah, absolutely.

Do you feel safe enough to admit a mistake, knowing that the cost of the small mistake will be smaller than the cost of not admitting it and risking lives?

Yeah. So I think that's actually a really interesting thread there from the point of view of unprofessionalism, because I actually was thinking about this earlier and it seems to me that professionalism often actually encodes that kind of fear. It actually is about a set of behaviors and expectations and rules. So to admit a mistake, Could be considered to be unprofessional to make the mistake in the first place.

And then admitting it basically means that you admit or that you show that you're unprofessional and not worthy of the title of professional.

Right. So in that case, then professional as a term actually becomes about fear.

Yeah. Where do you think does it come from?

Well, I think that the fear of being irrelevant is endemic in us. I think it's like that's millions of years old, I would think. But in terms of organizational structure, I think it comes from the Industrial Revolution and from Taylorist management theory, so-called scientific management. Um, which actually values people only as if they were components of a large machine. Uh, so everything comes down to what is your transactional value within the process of this large machine.

And then it's all about scalability. So in order to scale, we need to have a standard, and the standard is then what we call professional.

Yeah.

Which then also makes everyone replaceable.

I mean, it's interesting though, isn't it? Because you wouldn't, it's all about how the concept and the idea comes to be used. Because for example, you certainly wouldn't want your airline pilot on your next flight not to be subject to some fairly strict standards of behavior and professionalism and I think that's a very different thing to when professionalism becomes a straitjacket around people and prevents them from either admitting that they're wrong or even actually can prevent them from innovating, I think.

Yeah, totally. Because just if professionalism defines only one way forward, then innovation is by definition not part of it.

Well, I was thinking that perhaps in a lot of cases, professional behavior in organizations can be conflated with or can encode hierarchy such that a particular person in a particular position in the hierarchy does not feel that they are empowered to make any innovative suggestions because innovation belongs to The more senior people. The more senior people have to be seen to be innovating and strategizing in order for them to be valid. Less senior people, they don't, they actually, I think they can actually perceive having innovative ideas or making suggestions to their seniors to be potentially a threat for them.

And then seniority is one, And with an earlier podcast guest, I discussed with Alex the value of credentials. So what kind of credentials do you need to give a valid idea, innovation, um, or advice? And do you actually need that? Or are the credentials outdated the moment that you achieve them?

It's a bit like driving. It's a bit like learning to drive, I think, perhaps. You pass your driving test and after that, after another 5 years of experience, you may have a pretty good idea of the real complexities, dangers, and so on of driving or how to manage them better.

Mm-hmm.

If you get credentials in something like innovation, I would say they are pretty much out of date as soon as you finish them.

Otherwise it wouldn't be innovation.

Yeah, right. And whoever was teaching you wouldn't have done their job.

Yeah. And then I think the beauty of educational credentials is that it teaches you a way of thinking so that you can then, or it teaches you a toolkit with when then you can also improvise. And then maybe a professional is someone who knows when it's appropriate to improvise as opposed to dangerous? Because as you said, the pilot, we wouldn't want a pilot to suddenly improvise and to test maybe a new idea.

No, but we would definitely want them to be fully capable of improvising when something went badly wrong so that they could land their jet airplane on the Potomac and actually get everyone off the off the plane alive.

Yeah. Yeah. So where is then the, what does it mean to be professional then in this liminal space between knowing and not knowing? So if, because we, we cannot know all the situations.

No. Sorry, did you say what does it mean to be professional?

In the liminal space between knowing and not knowing.

I think professionalism in terms of a liminal space is kind of a bit orthogonal. I think it would be your decision as to how you apply the results of using liminal space rather than the space itself being professional or unprofessional. But I would say though that I think that the conscious, the ability to consciously and creatively use liminal space in whatever profession you are pursuing, Is a good part of being successfully professional in the best way, in the best sense.

And I think then nowadays even more where this, I think, especially as knowledge workers, everything is changing so fast that there's more spaces where we don't know, where we haven't been before, where we have to improvise.

Actually, the more I think about it, looking at the way things are going, the more it seems to me that professionalism will necessarily mean more, come to mean more and more the capacity to be able to synthesize, improvise, and intuit than to follow a specific set of particular rules, especially in knowledge work I'm thinking of. Obviously, from the point of view of doing things like piloting airplanes and so on, then you still want to have your very definite professional protocols in place because they're a lot about safety. But it's very interesting. There's a very interesting piece of pilot training or cockpit training about hierarchy where I think it is, I think that part of the training is that if you are like the navigator or the second in command in the plane, but you see something which is going really badly wrong, you not only are you permitted to, but you are obligated to actually tell the senior person about it and that you think something's going seriously wrong, or you will have considered to have failed in your own professionalism. So There's even in some definitions of professionalism, disturbing the structure is included in it as being a necessary consideration.

Because safety has always to be the priority.

Well, I think if you're up 30,000 feet, then yes, definitely.

Yeah. And then I was just, as you spoke, I was thinking of the balance between certainty and uncertainty. Because professionalism, as we discussed earlier, coming from Taylorism, it's about creating certainty. So if someone has the label of being a professional, we have certainty that they know what they're talking about, they have the credentials, they fit into a certain construct. But then if there is too much certainty, we're lacking the flexibility, the adaptability, and actually everything that is needed nowadays, as you just described, to succeed in a VUCA knowledge working job.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And if you think about it, I guess, More and more we are living in a world where it's absolutely completely impossible and has been for decades, I think, for one person to know more than a mere smattering of the amount of knowledge which is being generated in any given year or any given couple of years, even in your own specialty. I think it's really difficult.

Mm-hmm.

So It kind of, because a professional in a particular niche, for example, would be considered to be somebody that you should be able to rely on to know all about the latest research. Okay. I don't think it's possible anymore for anybody. So for example, my GP has got absolutely no idea about the most more recent research into high cholesterol, which suggests that in people over 60, it actually helps to prevent heart attacks. Whereas the received wisdom still within the whole of the NHS is that high cholesterol is going to cause a heart attack.

And that's the dilemma, right? If your GP would then say, oh, you know what? I don't know. Let me check that. We would most likely doubt their professionalism or would we only doubt their expertise and actually Appreciate the professionalism because they feel like they're their customer.

I don't think that they would ever dream of saying that because of the possibility of legal action against the NHS and so on. So it's all, it all suddenly gets very, very complicated, very difficult.

You mean they wouldn't say anything that they possibly didn't know?

I think that what they would say would be, according to the National Health, National Institute of blah, blah, whatever. I can't remember what it's called now. National Institute of Clinical Excellence. The correct protocol for high cholesterol is this. So this is what we can offer you.

And then why would we need a GP if their answer is something that an AI could have given us?

Well, that's a good question about whether AI, I think that a lot of diagnosis and stuff like that, is probably going to be a pretty good target for AI. In actual point of fact, AI may well have more and faster access to a much wider gamut of diagnostic information than a GP could have.

Yeah.

So I think that using it as an augmenting tool would be a really good thing to do there. But I think what I really, the I was thinking about it from the point of view of professionalism and how we have this expectation on people who are called professional, that they will know everything there is to know and how completely unrealistic that really is. So in a sense, to be truly professional in that kind of role, you need to be able to say, you know what, I'm gonna actually go and do, I'm gonna get the AI to go and do a whole bunch of research on this and see where the growing point is And what we can offer you to see what seems safe.

Yeah. Basically connecting the heart to the mind and using the technology we have at hand.

Yeah.

And we are not there yet. And do you think the limiting factor is our culture? So we as potential patients walking in and still believing in this abstract notion of a professional who has, who is the almighty, or is it the institution that forces the professional to stay on track and to only do—

I think it's a combination of both, to be honest. But then at the same time, I'm, at the same time, I think that having National Institute of Clinical Excellence is really important.

Yeah.

But What could we possibly do to speed up the integration of more recent research and the dissemination of it down through the process of hierarchy? Because when we had the pandemic, that was a really good example. When we had the pandemic, the development of the mRNA vaccines was super fast and it was actually possible. It was quite possible in dire circumstances to do everything far more quickly. So how did that work? That'd be an interesting study.

Suddenly a sense of urgency, maybe also more collaboration across the different institutes and countries.

Yeah, absolutely. Collaboration. There's another really interesting example, which is actually about the hole in the ozone layer. And the fact that it's nearly now nearly completely gone. And people will say, oh well, there was a hole in the ozone layer and everyone complained about that and now it's gone. Well, the reason that it's gone is because it was the subject of one of the most successful pieces of global cooperation ever. I can't remember the exact date when the anti-CFC legislation was passed by global agreement.

1987.

around most parts of the world. And that's why the ozone layer is, the hole in the ozone layer is now healed up, is because we actually managed for once to collaborate on something and agree that all of us agree from the vast majority of different countries that it would be a pretty good idea not to do it.

And I wonder, I don't know whether it applies to the your second example, but the example of the pandemic, I think it was one of the rare occasions where everyone, where it was okay for everyone to say, I don't know.

Yeah.

Independent of their degree and their rank. Even some politicians admitted that they didn't know, and scientists, and this kind of facilitated The collaboration and maybe the quick action.

I think it did. Yeah. It's such an interesting subject. I think the problem with professionalism in these contexts is when it becomes conflated with the idea that you mustn't say, I don't know. But in actual point of fact, to be truly professional is to be able to say, I've reached the point where I don't know. I've reached the point of the limit of my current knowledge and I need to research or I need to think some more or whatever.

And I, this is such a good point because when we think of Socrates, when we think of Dunning-Kruger, that those who are at the highest level of knowledge, they usually face almost an imposter syndrome because they believe that they don't know enough because they're so aware of the limitations of their knowledge. So we know for sure that the highest intelligent people are those who admit that they don't know.

Is that one of my favorite sayings? I think it might have been attributed to Newton at one point, but I'm not absolutely sure. But it is basically, we are as but children gathering colored pebbles on the shores of the oceans of truth. And whenever I think I really know a lot about something, I remember that.

Yeah. And still it's so dangerous or it's so uncomfortable to admit.

Well, it depends on who you're with. I mean, I find it great fun. I actually, I quite often run a workshop about this, where letting go of concepts, assumptions, and beliefs. And the fun part is, well, when you give all that stuff up, you actually have an infinite possibility field. And what might emerge from that? If we're not concerned, if we're not worried, about saying, I don't know, we might actually see not knowing as being an awesome resource of potential new discovery.

And yeah, an opportunity. I think it's those who step into a coaching role, I think especially coming from education, I think the, or into a facilitation role where it's our job not to know, but to facilitate. the insight for the other one. I think we know how liberating it can be to know that we don't have to know.

Yeah, yeah. I quite often like to describe my workshops as being joint journeys of discovery, and I'm going to help frame them and give some shape to them, but I don't know exactly where we'll end up any more than anyone else does.

And did you notice that there might be differences in reaction to that, whether there's the sense of opportunity versus a sense of insecurity, uncertainty, if even the moderator, the facilitator doesn't know where we are going?

I definitely, definitely noticed that. Yeah, yeah. I think my favorite one was, well, oh no, we wanted to be told exactly where to go and what to do. And my response to that whenever it happens is usually, well, I could do that, but then it wouldn't be your knowledge. And the way that we're doing this today means that you will You will find out what it is that you need to know. That's the aim.

And this comes then with great responsibility to actually follow up and do the work afterwards. Whereas if you come in and tell everyone where to go and what to do, then all fingers and eyes are on you.

Yeah.

And maybe that's where the fear comes from.

It might be quite satisfying. It might be quite satisfying for an hour to say, oh yeah, I can see how all that fits together and everything works, but you haven't really absorbed any of it at all. And it's forgotten within 20 minutes and you never apply it. I sincerely believe that.

Yeah. Yeah.

The only way it really works is for people to have the satisfaction and excitement of discovery, I think.

And in behavioral economics, there's something called the IKEA effect, like the Billy It's very difficult to get rid of your old Billy because we have the sense of attachment because we build it ourselves. And the IKEA effect refers to something that people feel attached to because they have built it themselves. And this can be a strategy, this can be a solution to a problem. And that's what happens in these workshops. Yeah.

Right, right. Yeah.

I had a question, follow-up question. Now it evaporated.

I had a thought while we were preparing this actually about how easy it is for professionalism to become an obstructive block to people who are neurodivergent in the workplace.

Tell me more.

Because professional behavior can be considered to be Oh, that's not very professional behavior. So there's this tacit implicit encoding of what kind of behavior's expected. And people who are on the spectrum or who are ADHD end up having to spend vast amounts of energy masking in order to accommodate this professionalism. But has it really got anything to do With the, with how professional they are or how great the results can be?

Dyslexia is one that comes to my mind immediately. Is someone less professional if they're dyslexic? And I think that's very old school thinking.

Yeah.

And this shows once more how this professional world was built by a majority Neurologically speaking, but also demographically speaking.

Yeah. Yeah. And also, I think probably if you really look back at the roots, privilege as well, because the professions were, you had to be privileged to enter a profession like medicine or scientific research or, you know.

Yeah. Although if we're going very far back, then the professions where, yes, it was a privilege, you had to work hard and then you got the title and all the privileges along with it, but it was very clear that it was only by your expertise and your craft that you will get this entitlement.

Yeah.

And nowadays it's—

You continue to have it.

Yes. And nowadays, especially with, um, professions that are in the knowledge worker sphere, where it's very difficult actually to tell where someone is honing a craft, is mastering that, um, then what does professionalism actually really mean?

But I think that's one of the things that we've, that we've been exploring here actually without explicitly stating it. So maybe it would be worth doing that. Which is that actually so much comes down to exactly what we mean by the, when we use the term professionalism. And what I think I've been suggesting is that there are various uses which are really valid and good and useful, helpful for us. And there are uses which are actually quite destructive and harmful.

Yeah.

And they may even, they may confusingly and difficultly in a given situation. They may even overlap.

And I think the question then is, is it used to exclude people or options?

I think it often is used to exclude people, to be honest. In a lot of situations, I think it's used to exclude people. I always remember my mother saying to me, well, You talk, they talk about people being amateur as if it's a, as if it's like a slur or an insult. Oh, they're an amateur.

Hmm.

But actually, actually an amateur does something for the sheer love of it. They do it because they're so absorbed and so obsessed and so completely taken with it. That's their thing. And of course, with a lot of people who are professionals, saying the same is I guess, but in terms of what the word originally meant.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a good one. And I think especially when we look at sports, someone who is an amateur would take the sport and the values behind it as seriously as a professional.

Yeah.

Um, and what I like about the idea of professionalism from pre-Taylor is that it puts the recipient, the client in the focus that the professional is willing to commit to helping the client with the best quality and service possible. So it's always in service to someone.

Yeah. Yes, I think that's true. Well, I suppose at one level, the definition of professional is that you get paid for something, which is another layer of, another layer and level of meaning and complexity to the term, isn't it?

Yeah. And then what does it mean nowadays to get paid for something? It doesn't make you any good. And then it's a very shallow definition.

Yeah, it is a shallow definition, but I've personally had the experience of plenty of senior people deciding that they don't want to buy a service because it doesn't cost enough.

Interesting. So what does it, what does this tell us? About professionalism.

It's seen, price, especially for services, is sometimes seen as an index of quality.

Yeah. And very often it makes sense and it's a shortcut. And I think very often it's just our brain that fools us. Yeah. As a final question, I'd like to close with the provocation. So sticking to our air quotes, unprofessional, what's an unprofessional thing you'd still advise others to try?

That's actually quite difficult given the number of different definitions we've covered. But what might be considered to be an unprofessional thing, which I think people should continue to try, is continuing to ask why you're being asked to do things. And what you're doing really means and how it fits into everything else. And that's something which I believe quite a lot of people on the autism spectrum will do quite naturally because it's very, very important to them to know. But quite often that will be interpreted as a signal of impertinence or unprofessionalism. You don't need to know that.

Who are you to ask? Are you questioning hierarchy? Are you questioning the orders?

Yeah. But I think actually that, I think actually that ideally everyone would know what the purpose of any organization is and they would know how they're, what they're doing fits into the larger purpose. And they're in a good place to make a much more valuable contribution.

Yeah. And I think what makes the why question so dangerous is that those who don't have an answer, who feel insecure about their hierarchy status whatsoever, will feel attacked by the why question, then become defensive. But someone who's very secure and has an answer will embrace and welcome the why question.

Yeah. Yes. Or would actually, may even actually say, yeah, you know what, that's actually a really good question. And go away and investigating that question could sometimes lead to the realization that a project, for example, is still running full blast, aiming for goals which really should have changed 6 months ago because the circumstances the organization's working in has changed. Yeah.

And then not allowing these questions is becoming a real risk for an organization.

Yeah, I think that, I think that can become, that, that can be one of the things that happens from a certain type of professionalism.

Yeah. To be continued.

Well, for centuries and by probably lots of other people apart from us, no doubt.

Thank you, Mike, for this exploration.

Thank you. It's been really interesting.

This was a conversation without the script. Now it's your turn. I'm Myriam Hadnes, and this has been Unprofessionalism.