More from #AHRINC – Barry Schwartz ‘The Loss of Wisdom’

Barry Schwartz’s talk at the AHRI National Convention ‘The Loss of Wisdom’ is all about finding an anecdote to the excesses of bureaucracy amongst other things. Barry argues that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire and that real practical everyday wisdom will help you rebuild our world.

Barry Swartz is a Professor of Psychology at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. He is the author of “The paradox of choice: why more is less” which explains the risk that too many choices can essentially paralyse people into inaction.

He was a pretty cool speaker (also he had a tough gig being first cab off the rank on Day 2) and it was interesting to learn that he’s working on another book (due out later this year) on the topic. It does seem a bit out there and fluffy, but after I walked away I thought that it did make an awful lot of common sense.

Barry says that we as human resources professional have the opportunity to transform the workplace, so read on and hopefully I can do a good job explaining what he said.

Initially he started off talking about the recent troubled economic times the world has been experiencing, and how people have been collectively wringing their hands trying to figure out what went wrong and what do to so that it doesn’t happen again.

People are asking ‘how can we make better rules to control the bankers? How can we create smarter incentives so that bankers will do things that actually serve the common good? What Barry’s talk suggests is that although we need better rules and we need smarter incentives neither of these is enough. He says that what we need in addition to good rules and smart incentives, is virtue. We need character and we need a particular virtue one the Philosopher Aristotle called “practical wisdom”.

He argues that:

• Virtue is something we can’t do without
• The one virtue that is the key, is practical wisdom
• Despite our best intentions to make things better we are inadvertently collectively engaged in a war on wisdom; making it increasingly difficult for people to develop wisdom and to display it
• And that this is a problem that can in fact be solved, maybe even by people like us!

I’ll share a few stories that Barry spoke about with regards to practical wisdom.

The Hospital Janitor

Across the screen, Barry had a list of the job responsibilities of the hospital janitor at major teaching hospital in the United States. He wanted us to note two things: that there is a long list of duties and not enough people to do it, and also that not one of the items on the list involves another human being.

Basically, they are saying that hospital janitors may as well work in a morgue because there was nothing mentioned about the interactions they have with other people. However some psychologists have studied these janitors in the United States and come across people like Mike; who described how one day he stopped mopping the floor in the hallway because Mr Jones, a patient, was out of his bed getting a little much needed exercise post surgery walking slowly up and down the hall and Mike didn’t want Mr Jones to slip. Then there was Sharlene, who ignored her supervisors and did not vacuum the visitors lounge because there was some family members in the visitor’s lounge who were there all day everyday keeping a vigil for a sick relative. They were at that moment taking a moment to get some rest and she didn’t want to wake them. There was Luke who washed the floor in a comatose young man’s room twice because the man’s father who had himself been keeping a vigil for 6 months hadn’t seen Luke do it the first time and the boy’s father was angry.
Barry said that behaviour like this from hospital juniors, from technicians to nurses (and if we are extremely lucky once in a while even from doctors) doesn’t just make you feel good- it actually improves patient care and it enables hospitals to run better.

Not all hospital janitors are like this, but the ones who are think that these sorts of traits are an essential part of their job, even though their job description contains nothing about it. Barry argues that the janitors have the moral will to do the right thing, to do right by other people. Beyond this they have the moral skill to know what doing right means, moral will and moral skill together they are what Aristotle meant by practical wisdom.

You can check Barry’s TED Talk out below to hear the story for yourself.