Philosophy of Life, Vitality and Flourishing

My philosophical practice has emerged out of working with organisations and business managers as well as laymen of heteregenous background. I believe leadership, creative collaboration and positive forms of influence call for competencies that are fruitfully approached and developed through movement of thought that my highly applicative and personally tuned, easy-to-access philosophy, can stimulate and inspire.

The point is to combine a pragmatic, context-sensitive, result-seeking focus with a personally relevant, human, emotional and respectful approach. Emphasizing the need for each to develop his or her own path and connectivity to one's innermost aspirations, my philosophy for managers yields openings for a leader to engage in intensive personal dialogue. The manager will be stimulated to activate his or her internal reflections vis-a-vis the truly meaningful for him or her. This will lead to growth in one's personal qualities and the strengthening of one's integrity.

The approach is highly unconventional but results, particularly with Nokia, I believe, speak for themselves.

The key ideas include:

1. There is more that is good (productive, useful, beautiful) in each human being that meets the eye; the point is to reconnect with this internal resource.

2. Better thoughts yield better actions. But thought patterns are hard to identify and challenge; the best method is to adopt an indirect approach that through a process of "movement of thought," enriched by a life-respectful stimulation of alternatives, creates a context in which one's internal system can start to create its own butterfly effects.

3. A leader's key challenges of personal growth are typically not analytic, knowledge- or skill-related. The fundamental challenges lie in the dimension of the personal, concern his or her character and hinge on matters of mindset. These are best approached using a tender and dynamic methodology which is unintrusive, respectful and sensitive to the idiosyncracies of each human being. It is vital that the "training" does not instrumentalize the leader, nor makes attempt to manipulate him or her, and will not reduce him or her to the status of a "trainee".

Articles:

Positive Philosophical Practice

I am a philosopher of the everyday with deep interest in promoting and inspiring human flourishing on the individual, group and organizational levels.

In the context of my philosophical practice, my guiding idea is to turn philosophy to the service of vitality, virtuousness, positive energy and positive spirals of flourishing. The approach is focused upon impact and upon the embetterment of people's actual lifes. Taking its inspiration from the Socratic ideal of taking philosophy to the streets and from the the ancient promise of philosophy as a project of the good life, the approach focuses upon the positive deviance, the life-giving and the flourishing. It amounts to a "positive philosophical practice" that joins forces with Positive Organizational Scholarship and Positive Psychology.

My key operative instrument is speech and dialogue. Particularly intriquing is the context of traditional non-interactive (mass)lecturing turned into forums for promoting reflective philosophical thinking for the purposes of life-enhancement. The idea is to turn the seemingly one-sided and passive instrument of (mass)lecturing into an operatively sound vehicle for the benefit of human flourishing. This is achieved by adopting a non-disciplinary and non-instructive methodology. In that methodology, the lecturer puts aside the imperative of instructing the participants on some content-specific theme in order to become a "tender and dynamic" facilitator for the thought-enriching situation.

In my appraoch, the philosopher-speaker becomes a conductor of thoughts for an audience playing their thought instruments. Context-sensitive subtleties related to the unfolding of the co-created and emergent performance become critical. Associations, intuitions and personal engagement are gently and firmly encouraged, guided and reinformed by the philosopher-speaker. An intensive and energized context for each participant to experience "movement of thought" is created through meaning-intensive, inspirational and stimulating openings on fundamental life themes provided by the the philosopher-speaker.

What looks like a "lecture" thus turns into an intra-active experience of thinking-by-myself-in-the-company-of-others in the living presence. This yields a platform for energized, associative and personally enlightening thinking processes that will help the participants to reconnect with the significant themes of their lives for the benefit of their personal flourishing.

Traditional model of informative lecturing is thus rejected in favour of a "living philosophy",
"philosophy on the fly" and personalized thinking that aims to serve associatively and generatively the growth processes of the participants. Distancing itself from the argumentative, criticism-focused, disciplinary and emotion-aversive tradition of Western academic
philosophy, my Positive Philosophical Practice turns towards the hidden life-supporting
potentials of each human being throught thinking processes. The approach amounts to a positively tuned Socratic approach to a revitalized sense of life, mental strengths and life-supporting potentials.

The approach has been found effective as an instrument to promote flourishing in hundreds of seminars and lectures (lasting from 2-3 hours to anything up to a week, the lenght of my Paphos semianr which I have conducted over 30 times) for radically different audiences and organizational settings.

Scholarly work that support my approach

  1. Peter Senge's work on "Personal Mastery", "Mental models" and "Systems Thinking" in his groundbreaking The Fifth Discipline (1990). The research of Raimo P. Hämäläinen and myself on Systems Intelligence (see below) take Peter's keys further and point to innate systems comprehension competencies as the backbone of our human constitution.
  2. The work on Positive Psychology by Martin Seligman and Barbara Fredrickson and others. Scientific work on human flourishing is groundbreaking, a truly important intellectual movement of our times. I celebrate the results of Positive Organizational Scholarship which emphazies strengths and competencies as opposed to weaknesses and defects as the focus of research. I highly recommend Fredrickson's book Positivity, it is a milesstone, as well as Kim Cameron's Positive Leadership.
  3. Research that reveal the significance of character virtues such as humility, fairness, respect for others and integrity for effective global leadership; a comprehensive handbook is Character Strenghts and Virtues (2004). An early vision to this effect is Warren Dennis, Why Leader's Can't Lead (1989); Jim Collins´ Good to Great (2001) is very strong in arguing for "Level 5 Leadership" which emphasizes characer virtues. Highly useful is also the work of Judi Brownell and others that emphasize the insufficiency of "common competencies approaches" and bring forth the need to develop less tangible "distinctive competencies" specific to the individual including in particular character virtues as the backbone of effective global leaders. (J. Brownell, "Meeting the Competency Needs of Global Leaders", Human Resource Management vol. 45, 2006).
  4. The "relational turn" in therapy, infant studies and psychology as represented in the work of Beatrice Beebe, Alan Fogel, Daniel N. Stern and the Boston Change Process Study Group on the nature of intersubjectivity, co-creation, co-regulation, implicit relational knowing, moments of meeting, change, and vitality affects. Also fundamental is the work of Robert D. Stolorow, George E. Atwood and Donna Orange on intersubjective contextualism, subjectivity and the intersubjective systems perspective, as crystallized in their Worlds of Experience.
  5. Ellen J. Langer's work on Mindfulness and the significance of mental benchmarks as the cornerstone of an improved practice of life.
  6. The scholarship of emotions, including the concept of emotional intelligence first proposed by Salovey and Mayer in 1990 and popularized by Goleman in his Emotional Intelligence (1995), and the research on "emotional energy" by Randall Collins in Interaction Ritual Chains (2004), as well as the emerging reserach on "Why Does Affect Matter in Organizations?" (Sigal G. Barsade and Donald E. Gibson, Academy of Management Practices vol 21, 2007). An insightful study combining a philosophical and therapeutic perspective is Donna M. Orange's Emotional Understanding (1995). Barbara Fredrickson's work is groundbreaking in this area, and her "Broaden and Build" theory describes basically what I try to do in my positive philosophical practice.

Personal Historical Background

Ensio Miettinen, a creative Finnish industry leader, engineer and founder of the Ensto Group triggered my interest in philosophy for the workplace in 1989. We co-authored the book Muutostekijä (Change Factor) that became a best seller and a booster for people-intensive leadership in Finnish management thinking. The publication of this book in 1990 changed the course of my philosophical activities profoundly for good.

The Nokia Miracle

In the beginning of the 1990's I started to exchange ideas with the senior management of Nokia, particularly with CEO Jorma Ollila and Matti Alahuhta, the head of Nokia's telecommunications business (and later of mobile phones). I became fascinated by and more involved in the Finnish company that they were leading. Meeting more of the people in Nokia's senior management around 1994-6, people such as Pekka Ala-Pietilä, Kari Ahola, Pekka Vartiainen, Kari Suneli, Pertti Korhonen, Heikki Kasko, J.T. Bergqvist, Lauri Kivinen, I started to sense in a more concrete way what people-intensive engineer- and leadership brilliance might mean. I had the priviledge to collaborate extensively with various part of the emerging miracle via lectures, road shows, and seminars as well as personal one-on-one meetings with many of the key people.

Interview with Nokia People Magazine

Systems Analysis with Human Touch

When Professor Raimo P. Hämäläinen suggested to me in 2000, after I had left the University of Helsinki, that I would join his team at the Systems Analysis Laboratory, I was immediately thrilled of this chance of working with bright engineering students at the Helsinki University of Technology.

The idea was, as Raimo sketched it, that I would be a part-time Professor with minimal load of administration focusing on my style of philosophy of life with teaching that would be offered to all. Raimo had been to my general lectures and to my Paphos-seminar. He knew my style inside out. What was astonishing to me was how well my approach fitted in and reinforced some of the processes already underway at HUT.

It was clear to me that Nokia's staggering success was due to brilliant professional expertise plus something else - a certain spirit, value-intensive leadership, people-focused approach and self-leadership of the key managers. These were all things I believed in. These were the themes of my discussions with Nokia's senior management and the theme of my seminars and lectures. Maybe as a Professor I could contribute to mindset factors parallel to those with philosophical teaching for future key engineers.

We agreed that I would focus on
- attitude to life
- extending one's thinking
- creative problem solving.

But just as philosophy is by its nature about the bigger picture, so is systems thinking, an area that had been studied extensively at the Systems Analysis Laboratory. It was natural to seek explicit connections between my type of philosophy of life and systems thinking. Peter Senge's work, which Raimo and I had independently always admired, was the connecting bridge.

As a result, we developed courses for the Helsinki University of Technology with the theme Filosofia ja systeemiajattelu. (Philosophy and Systems Thinking). The approach is highly energetic and reflective, inspiring and application-oriented. Basic reading includes Senge's Fifth Discipline and certain philosophical books such as Comte-Sponville's Small Treatise on the Great Virtues or de Botton's Consolations of Philosophy. There is a strong emphasis on stimulating the participant's personal thought processes and inner discourse regarding her own life. These courses have been extremely well received among students.

We are offering a seminar in the fall for the best students as a forum to develop themselves further. Facilitated by Raimo Hämäläinen and myself, this seminar entitled Creative Problem Solving, has produced inspired research-oriented publications by the students of which Raimo and I are both quite pround.

Systems Intelligence

These activities led to the concept of Systems Intelligence as the core of our focus. This notion, invented by Raimo in the context of our seminar of fall 2002, seems fundamental to me. By Systems Intelligence we mean intelligent behaviour in the context of complex systems involving interaction and feedback. A subject acting with systems intelligence engages successfully and productively with the holistic feedback ´mechanisms of her environment. She perceives herself as part of the whole, the influence of the whole upon herself as well as her own influence upon the whole. Observing her own interdependency with the feedback-intensive environment, she is able to act intelligently.

Our conviction is that Systems Intelligence is a key form of human behavioural intelligence. Systems Intelligence is about the betterment and improvement of human life. The idea is to take the ancient promise of philosophy seriously, the one that called for the Good Life, and at the same time take seriously the engineer's quest of finding practical steps to creating such life.

We believe our organizational behaviors, family life, individual lives, communal lives and co-operation in general can be improved enormously by relatively simple, even trivial means. The moral driving force behind Systems Intelligence is the creed that such profound changes of utmost human relevance hinge on the lack of Systems Intelligence.