'The Joyous Negativity of Good Work' with Dr Richard Claydon.

“We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.” -  Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

One of my favourite workshop techniques is from the liberating structures playbook.  You ask participants how they would organise their business so it achieved the exact opposite of its strategic intention and value proposition.  Once people make their lists, ask them what they are currently doing that contributes to that negative reality.  Amid much laughter, they identify many things that are achieving the opposite of their intentions.

This absurdity is everywhere in organisations. Thinking about it can be liberating and joyful. But we don’t do it. Why? Because you have to be positive!

Positivity often means aligning yourself completely, utterly and absolutely with the organisational mission, vision and values, displaying your engagement with your smiling demeanour and high-energy attitude. But it is often all display. 

At its worst, such positivity is debilitating. By putting all your energy into being positive, you lose touch with your critical faculties and actively become stupider.  As messengers bearing bad news get shot, nobody points out any potential problems.  Consequently, the organisation lurches from crisis to crisis. 

The “joyous negativity” technique outlined above pushes people into a place in which they can see a more complex reality than they usually do.  Once they have, they rapidly begin finding ways to do things better.  

In this week’s Dialogic Drinks, we will:

• Look at the role of joyous negativity in the workplace
• Examine how people transmit such negativity in safe ways
• Explore how you can cultivate joyous negativity and become an ironic sensemaker

Dr Richard Claydon is the co-founder of EQ Lab, and the designer of the Future of Leadership module at Macquarie Business School’s Global MBA Program (ranked #6 globally by CEO Magazine).

He was awarded the highest achievable marks for a Ph.D in behavioural science. A Harvard Top-200 Management expert and business columnists for the Guardian newspaper have described this research as “a touchstone for the future work in management and organisation”, “outstanding in daring imagination” and “at the forefront of modern discussion and debate.”

Richard is a tier one tennis player, have coached tennis professionally, and also designed the tactics creator for the multi award-winning and world-leading management simulation, Football Manager.

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