Business Buddhism

This post runs long, so I am starting with the conclusions, in case you can’t be bothered to read the rest.

Conclusions:
1. Human nature is not so much to be obedient (follow an order), but to please (want to be accepted). We want to comply, fit in, be accepted, participate, contribute, and be a member of the tribe. From an evolutionary perspective that makes sense: the tribe protects and you are accepted if you conform. We are willing to make great sacrifices for the tribe in the form of what we are willing to do unto others and what we are willing to do unto ourselves. This can have dramatically bad and some good consequences.
2. If we believe that people tend to be obedient, it has consequences for the mindset and policy with which we engage with them. Evil actions are then a consequence of blind followership. In that world you have to answer force with force and aim to replace the leadership.
3. Rather, if you believe people are pleasers, the world looks different. Instead of answering force with force, great power then derives from integrity, compassion and communication. If we want to change people’s line of actions, we don’t have to replace their current structure of order-compliance with our own authority. Our mission becomes to change their conception of the tribe they belong to and to make them aware of their choices.
4. Through that lens, the motives of the leader don’t look that different from the follower anymore. The leader too looks for affirmation.
5. For ourselves the lesson is that we need to be wary of our desire to please. At all times, we must be mindful of our power to choose and that we must choose from our own conscience. This is of highest moral and spiritual importance.

The background:
You are likely familiar with the Milgram experiment: When requested to give electric shocks to a stranger in a teacher-student-learning set-up, 65% of participants continued to increase the voltage all the way to 450-volts. Milgram and scientific community have described the several times replicated results as exemplifying our obedient nature. The results of the experiment itself suggest something different though.

If the subject of the experiment was hesitating at any time to increase the electric shocks to the “student,” the experimenter had four prods ready in response:
1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice, you must go on.
The four prods escalate. The 1st is a friendly request, the 2nd is a firm request, until the 4th one is an order: “You must go on.” As the subject struggled to increase the voltage, the experimenter would move through the prods step-by-step. When the subject’s hesitation maintained, the experimenter escalated and eventually would voice the order: “You have no other choice, you must go on.”

At that point, 100% of the subjects stopped.

If obedience had been the key characteristic that drove the subjects’ actions, then the direct order should have had a complying response. Instead it was this moment when the subjects woke up to their own agency and pronounced some version of, “But I do have a choice. I will not continue.” This result suggests that the subjects were not following an order before the fourth prod either. Instead, they were looking to please, to serve even – to please the instructor and to please and serve the scientific purpose of the experiment as it had been presented to them.

5. For ourselves the lesson is that we need to be wary of our desire to please. At all times, we must be mindful of our power to choose and that we must choose from our own conscience.

This post is derived from a great piece by WNYC Radiolab that you can find here:
http://www.radiolab.org/2012/jan/09/