Watching the TED talks for performance inspiration for my next webinar and I got side-tracked by the content in this one by Barry Schwartz, talking of practical wisdom (or Phronesis, the name of my previous blog). He starts by taking us through the job description of a hospital janitor: mop the floor, restock the cabinets etc. It's a long list on this job description. But, as he says, there is "not a single thing on it that involves a single human being". And yet, if you talk to Mike, Luke, and other hospital janitors, they will talk to you about their job in relation to the patients in the hospital. Kindness, care and empathy are an essential part of the job, but their job description doesn't contain say anything about it. It's their interaction with patients and their families that helps the hospital and patient care to function effectively. What's more, if you ask any of the janitors how long it took to learn their job, they'll tell you it takes years to be experienced as a hospital janitor. And they aren't referring to mopping the floor or emptying the trash cans, but how long it takes to be experienced working around patients, their families, the doctors and nurses. The full talk by Barry Schwartz is a call for "practical wisdom" in a world which has gone made with bureaucracy. His call is that we: - acknowledge and celebrate moral heroes and demand that people around us do too
- strive to be ordinary and extraordinary moral heroes ourselves
- acknowledge that anything that involves interaction with other people involves moral work and that moral work depends on practical wisdom
- he starts a point by making a mundane point or statement that you couldn't disagree with e.g. a janitor's job list is full of all these tasks... and then follows it up with a suprise e.g. but not a single thing on the list involves a single human being.
- he uses the names of people in his stories. Luke (the hospital janitor) said this, Mark told the story of ....
- he uses moral examplars e.g. Barack Obama and the hospital janitors. He tells us what these moral examplar do and don't do "He didn't say ... He didn't say ... Instead he said...".
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