btrmt.

Analects

filter by:

On Leadership

stuff On being the strength of others

show:

article

Values often function as virtue ethics—traits we’re expected to cultivate. But virtues are context-dependent: courage for a soldier isn’t courage for a teacher, and people respond primarily to their environment. So the real task is to design the context.

Values Don't Matter

article

Every organisation or institution you have ever been a part of has almost certainly collected a list of values they want everyone to abide by. Corporates, militaries, sports clubs, schools, local councils, professional bodies. Any place where people collect in a serious way to do things. Even, sometimes, in groups that are less serious, like house rules in a D&D group. People love values. It’s a shame they don’t work.
Values often function as virtue ethics—traits we’re expected to cultivate. But virtues are context-dependent: courage for a soldier isn’t courage for a teacher, and people respond primarily to their environment. So the real task is to design the context.
Check it out

filed under:

betterment spiritual-architecture on-culture on-ethics on-leadership

audio

Values are virtue ethics in disguise—traits we’re expected to cultivate. But virtues are context-dependent (courage for a soldier isn’t courage for a teacher) and the situation overwhelmingly drives behaviour. The real task is designing the context, not listing the virtues.

Values Don't Matter

audio

Everyone loves organisational values. Corporates, militaries, sports clubs, schools—any place where people collect in a serious way has a list of qualities they want everyone to embody. But values are just virtue ethics by another name. And virtue ethics suffer two rather troubling problems: virtues are hugely context-dependent, and the situation overwhelmingly drives behaviour anyway. So if you want people to act virtuously, design the context.
Values are virtue ethics in disguise—traits we’re expected to cultivate. But virtues are context-dependent (courage for a soldier isn’t courage for a teacher) and the situation overwhelmingly drives behaviour. The real task is designing the context, not listing the virtues.
Check it out ↗

filed under:

betterment spiritual-architecture on-culture on-ethics on-leadership

article

Control the water, control the people. Today’s water is energy, social media, infrastructure. We’re coerced through convenience, not malice. There are many vectors for control—we don’t need to hand them over.

Hydraulic Despotism

article

If you control the water, you control the people: Karl Wittfogel’s theory of hydraulic civilisations gives us a tidy little insight I think is worth extracting. Today ‘water’ is many things: water, electricity, social media and it has some interesting implications. There are some better theories to get after this insight of ours, but better doesn’t mean interesting, and none sound nearly as sexy as Hydraulic Despotism. So I’m going to bring it back.
Control the water, control the people. Today’s water is energy, social media, infrastructure. We’re coerced through convenience, not malice. There are many vectors for control—we don’t need to hand them over.
Check it out

filed under:

connection thought-architecture collective-architecture digital-architecture wealth-architecture on-politics-and-power on-leadership on-being-fruitful on-culture on-ethics

audio

We’ve been taught that cults are dark and scary things. But we have been fooled. The cult is a prominent building block of modern community. If you’re not in one, you’re probably doing something wrong. The question is, is the cult you’re in a cult you chose?

Mundane Cults

audio

The word cult conjures images of hooded figures, mass suicide, and narcissistic leaders. But this dark image is nonsense—the kind that makes us more vulnerable to destructive groups. Cults are actually a pervasive building block of modern community, from veganism to fitness franchises to health movements. The question isn’t whether you’re in one, but whether it’s one you chose.
We’ve been taught that cults are dark and scary things. But we have been fooled. The cult is a prominent building block of modern community. If you’re not in one, you’re probably doing something wrong. The question is, is the cult you’re in a cult you chose?
Check it out ↗

filed under:

connection spiritual-architecture thought-architecture collective-architecture on-(un)happiness on-being-fruitful on-culture on-leadership

article

Vincent’s S-CALM model describes the situational and cognitive factors that undermine ethical behaviour. Mechanistic thinking helps explain how those factors might operate, and thus, where we might intervene on them.

Mechanical Ethics

article

Dennis Vincent’s S-CALM model elegantly identifies the factors that lead good people to do bad things. But identifying what goes wrong isn’t quite the same as understanding how to fix it. Here, I show how mechanistic thinking—illustrated by the ETHIC stack—can help us understand the causal plumbing beneath Vincent’s model, turning it from a diagnostic tool into an intervention toolkit.
Vincent’s S-CALM model describes the situational and cognitive factors that undermine ethical behaviour. Mechanistic thinking helps explain how those factors might operate, and thus, where we might intervene on them.
Check it out

filed under:

betterment somatic-architecture collective-architecture on-ethics on-leadership
Newsletter | About
Join over 2000 of us. Get the newsletter.
Read it first | Privacy | Not working?