On how the heart got squeezed

Over the last few decades, the worldwide level of education has slowly increased. Although in some countries the process is very slow, in most countries more kids are going to schools, and in already well developed countries (in terms of education) the percentage of students that reach the level of tertiary or even higher education is exploding. The UNESCO even described this explosion in access to education as ‘massification’[1]. More than in any period of the existence of humanity, there is now a focus on the development and use of the brain.

While this trend is totally in line with modern civil views that it is better to fight with words than with weapons, a serious societal crack is now appearing. It’s called ‘polarization’.

In a world where, for decades, verbal capacities have been put on a pedestal, and where debating skills are a conditio sine qua non for rising to power, we have forgotten a basic evolutionary weaving error. This truth – which is kindergarten knowledge for any advertising or PR professional – reads: Emotions eat arguments for breakfast.

For as long as we have known, in a democratic society politics (and public government) has been the domain of reasonable people who displayed (but never solved) their disagreements by standing up and producing words. As populations grew in size, societies grew more complex, and the words politicians used more and more became highly specialized jargon. What has never changed is that not once in political history have all these wonderful words been so convincing as to actually move a member of one political party to another – a curious phenomenon. Political debating has become a rather boring cultural ritual needed to pass the years between elections. (This way of talking with closed minds is eloquently characterized by Otto Scharmer within his framework of Theory U as ‘downloading’.)

The experience of politics as, in some ways, verbal theater slowly became clear to those who were not so into words: the ones who were not able to make it to highly esteemed higher educational institutions and thus denied verbal eloquence as a means to power. Their response was obviously not verbal, but emotional: first the feeling of being overlooked and unimportant, then finally irritation, even turning into angriness. Hence: the breeding ground of polarization.

One simplified, but still interesting, view on human energy sources talks of the triad of the head, the heart and the gut. Where higher levels of education stress the development of the head (brains), the allergy to this verbal trend has been moving people down the spine rather than up, making them focus primarily on their gut feelings or even lower. Consequently, it has seemed that a growing part of society is functioning on two entirely different operating systems: brains versus balls. This has created the perfect social conditions for the expansions of two diagonal positioned cultural bubbles. Because, as an old saying goes:

‘A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still.’

As often happens when two extremes collide, the one in the middle – the heart, here representing the power to balance – gets squeezed. Where arguments and instincts battle for control, the soft power of acting according to values easily becomes inaudible. To come back to a more stable world, the challenge therefore has to be to strengthen each and everyone’s capacity to slow down and listen more carefully to each other while focusing on essential questions, such as what makes life worth living? Because as it appears, when focusing on the beauty of life, as human beings we find our common ground again. Like Sting tried to tell us when he sang:

‘the Russians love their children too’.

There are already many international days of such and such, but maybe it is time for a ‘World Beauty Day’. Because one thing is certain: if we don’t develop a stronger ability to share what deeply moves us, we will never again understand what can unite us.

[1] Trends in global higher education: tracking an academic revolution; executive summary. See also: Thinking About ‘Massification of Higher Education Revisited’.

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This text is written as part of my membership of COMMON and part of the release of the first American version of Project Beauty and the release of the book ‘Seeking Beauty | USA’.

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Additional information

• More info about Project Beauty is available on the website of the project.
• The questionnaire that is at the heart of the project can be found here.
• Stay updated on Project Beauty: follow us on Facebook.
• So far the core survey of Project Beauty has been used for national representative surveys in five European countries, the USA and Peru. Project Beauty now covers data about perceptions of beauty of over half a billion people worldwide.
• Recently we also started offering an in-company version of this inspiring project. In case you are interested to learn more about applying Project Beauty within your organisation: please contact us.

Since a number of weeks an ‘organism at the edge of life’ is spreading: COVID-19. To minimize contamination we are advised to practice ‘social distancing’ which means as much as: avoid working at the office, don’t go to conferences or meetings but try to work from home as much as possible. On top of this professional earthquake also our regular social life has to change: don’t go to concerts or exhibitions, stay out of the gym and especially avoid restaurants or pubs. Basically it comes down to this: the only safe place to do all the things we need and want to do is at home.

Although the effects of this confinement are massive on the economical, societal and environmental level, they also have a severe impact on two personal aspects: our body and our mind. For our body it for sure will mean a tremendous decrease of physical movements. The amount of square meters where we can walk, work and play is suddenly reduced from 149 million km2 to several tens (or if you’re lucky hundreds) of square meters. The second aspect (and for a big part as a result of the first, because body and mind are closely linked): the variety of our daily mental experiences will most likely suffer a total implosion.

Staying indoors for a long time is not a favorite leisure activity for many of us, especially not in this space that we already know so well and where we on purpose really try to get away from so often: home. Going outside only to get some groceries or open a window to breath some fresh air is a way of living we more or less associate with prison life. And low and behold: suddenly we are all ‘prisoners’ in some way. And for this foreseeable future called quarantine we have to deal with the question: how are we going to spend our time in these hopefully comfortable but still limited number of rooms we call home?

Some of us are in vital professions and still need to leave the house to go to work, some of us do work that now has to be done from home. But still an enormous number people are suddenly confronted with an amount of spare time that we normally associate with weekends or holiday periods. Only: we can’t go out to do these lovely relaxing and beautiful leisure things that we are intrinsically motivated to do, like traveling, sports, going to exhibitions, movies or theaters, or even shopping. Many of our favorite spare time activities are suddenly off-limits, which means all of a sudden we are psychologically in uncharted territories. Because where will our mind wander when our bodies are confined to a limited number of square meters at home.

“When one door closes, another opens.”

The saying is attributed to one of the founders of modern telephony Alexander Graham Bell: “When one door closes, another opens.” What is often left out is the second part of his insight: “… but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”

A quarantine period also closes many (behavioral) doors, but we apparently are not automatically inclined to focus on the ones that are opened up by this drastic reduction of freedom of movement. Well: the solution might be not easy, but certainly a cheap one: why not let our mind wander and go down paths it has not been for a while? Because, what other choice have we for new and exciting experiences, then to look at everything in and around our houses in a new way and try to see things that we maybe only noticed when they were new or young? These everyday things we used to love or hold beautiful, but stopped appreciating, because we have become too familiar with them. Why not try to use this awkward period to find this unnoted open door of ‘unfamiliarizing’, behind which we may discover a new world of experiences consisting of people and things we already know for a long time?

“There is more beauty in a rock than you can experience in a lifetime.”

The American art and education scholar Eliot Eisner once said “There is more beauty in a rock than you can experience in a lifetime.” So when there is nowhere to go for some time except from the living room to the bedroom, and from the bedroom to the toilet, and from the toilet to the bathroom and then back again: why not pick-up Eisner’s challenge? Why not just try to look at the plants on your windowsill for a while and discover how many shades of green they have? Take a book that you read a long time ago and find out if it still captivates you? Sit (or even go online and talk) with a roommate or friend and together pick-up an intriguing question that may lead to a deeper meeting than you had with them for a long time? Or look in the eyes of your loved one and think back of your first spark? Summarized: why not take a time-out to review and experiment with what personally for you really makes life worth living? Project Beauty’s set of questions might even be helpful.

And maybe it is even possible: turning this quarantine period with all these drastic physical constraints into something advantageous: a small step towards the expansion of our minds. Then (and of course only if your health or the health of a loved one has not been seriously affected!) for some of us it might give this at first sight doomsday scenario of the COVID-19 epidemic also the deeper layer of a blessing in disguise.

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Additional information

●  More info about Project Beauty is available on the website of the project.

● The questionnaire that is at the heart of the project can be found here. It is open for use by everyone.

● If you want to stay updated about the project: follow us on Facebook.

● So far the core survey of Project Beauty has been used for national representative surveys in five European countries. Recently we also started offering an in-company version of this inspiring project. In case you are interested to learn more about applying Project Beauty within your organisation: please contact us.

● Project Beauty was made possible by the generous support of various research agencies (Dynata Benelux, Blauw Research, PanelBase) and numerous wonderful individuals.

● To support Project Beauty you can purchase your country version (e-)book from the Seeking Beauty series.

● Please contact us in case you are interested in a branded version of these books as a special value-based corporate gift.

Project Beauty asks questions – questions about a deeply personal topic – a theme that for many of us touches on what makes life worth living. Although the project started out as an inquiry to find out more about the variety of perceptions on beauty, the questionnaire that lies at the heart of the project is now used to create more awareness about what really matters in our lives. How did this U-turn happen?

Asking questions is at the heart of research for business. The aim is mostly gathering information, to discover new truths or simply to support organizational decision making. This focus on gathering information in research is often so strong, we easily tend to forget something important, namely the process we use to reach our goal: human interaction. Whether it’s between two people or between one and a few thousands, asking questions to someone and getting an answer is nothing less than an act of communication.

When conducting a survey, it sometimes seems like we expect the respondent not to act like a human being, but more like some sort of reply-robot: “Touch the blue button to let us know how satisfied you are with our company;”, or “Touch the green button if you have ever heard from our brand before.“ How people actually feel about these questions is a non-issue, as long as they supply the required answers. The emotional experience of participating in a survey almost never interests those conducting them, it is all about the mental process of supplying the needed information. Qualitative research may be an exception, but even then participants are still mostly seen as opinion barrels: whatever happens to them after they have opened their minds and the contents is bought off with a book coupon or a bottle of wine.

But when we started out in 2008 asking the readers of a popular magazine in the Netherlands how they experience beauty, something rather peculiar happened: at the end of the survey many participants thanked us for allowing them to fill in the questionnaire. One woman even stated, “While answering your questions I decided to change some things in my life.” This in turn caused us to deeply rethink the idea behind the survey and to ask ourselves anew: “What business do we want to be in?”

“While answering your questions I decided to change some things in my life.”

Research often has a very one-way-street view of communication and neglects the fact that the process between the one who asks a question and the one gives an answer is all about interaction – interaction which by nature involves two sides. Understanding this, the work of interaction theorist Paul Watzlawick helps to illuminate how complicated the seemingly simple art of online surveying really is. No matter how it is conducted, online, written, by telephone or face-to-face, Watzlawick says every communication has a content and relationship aspect.

Pondering on a question to find an answer is a deeply human process. It can set in motion a personal discovery process and can even result in new insights. From this angle, a question is not aimed first and foremost at getting an answer, but at starting a new thought process with another person, a process that directs him or her to brain areas that – for all sorts of reasons – have not been visited for too long. The American author Warren Berger describes this view on asking in his thought provoking book A more Beautiful Question. The power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas.

In Project Beauty, we have now used this power to ask “wake-up questions” to over 10.000 people in 7 European and American countries about how they deal with this – wonderful but often also complicated – phenomenon called ‘Beauty’. Questions like “What is the most beautiful thing you have ever experienced in your life?“ And, ultimately, it was the huge amount of gratitude expressed by many of the participants after they had contemplated their personal answers, that changed our view of the business we are in. No longer do we consider Project Beauty to be just a research project, but rather we like to say, we are in the ‘gift business’. Because that is what powerful questions can be: a simple spark that ignites a deep discovery process into what makes life worth living.

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Additional information

●       More info about Project Beauty is available on the website of the project.

●       The questionnaire that is at the heart of the project can be found here.

●       Want to stay updated Project Beauty? Follow us on Facebook.

●       So far the core survey of Project Beauty has been used for national representative surveys in five European countries. Recently we also started offering an in-company version of this inspiring project. In case you are interested to learn more about applying Project Beauty within your organisation: please contact us.

●       Project Beauty was made possible by the generous support of various companies (Winkle, PanelBase, SSI Benelux, Blauw Research, Blauw Research Gmbh) and numerous wonderful individuals.

●       The development and growth of Project Beauty is sustained with the ‘Seeking Beauty’ gifts: a series of fully personalized (e-)books, based on the core questionnaire of the project, and available for private and corporate gifts. We also offer special in-company versions of the project. Do you like our venture and are you interested in supporting us: feel free to try out these gifts or contact us!

We tend to think of beauty as a concept belonging to the private domain. It describes an experience we have when we look at art or at nature (some fellow human beings included), when we visit churches, or when we listen to sometimes life-changing music. It is a uniquely private phenomenon that gives rise to deeply human emotions. So, what can beauty possibly have to do with organizations? After all, isn’t the debate about what constitutes a healthy and happy organization already complex enough? Well, maybe it is, but it seems that ‘beauty,’ a wonderful but complicated concept, does play a role in the way we interact with the jobs we have or, more generally, with the work we do. So we better stop and have a look at what is happening here.

From an instrumental and obvious point of view, it’s crystal clear that organizations are into beauty. Calculations about beauty are, for instance, an important marketing argument, e.g. “does the advert or the product look good?” And why else would graphic and product design be creative business disciplines? Beauty seems to play a role on the level of our subconscious: we are inclined to react to it even when we are not aware of it, and this is of course a commercial ‘window of opportunity’. But the connection between organizations and beauty is much more layered than just this economic surface strategy.

“Does the work you do or the job you have add anything to the beauty in your life, or does it detract from that beauty?”

In Project Beauty, the survey that focuses on the experience of beauty, we ask a diverse set of questions, one of which specifically looks at its relationship with work: “Does the work you do or the job you have add anything to the beauty in your life, or does it detract from that beauty?” The term ‘beauty’ in this formulation does not just denote its seductive capacity, but instead encapsulates its broader, evaluative sense: it seeks to reflect to what extent our professional activities add to or detract from what makes life worth living. It aims to connect what we do at work to what we might also call a feeling of purpose in life. It shows how the way we earn our money reflects who we feel we are and if we feel our profession matches our identity.

Looking at the result of the latest surveys in the five EU countries where Project Beauty has thus far been conducted, we find that over 45% of the population has a job or does work that adds to the beauty in their lives, whether that be by a lot or a little, while roughly 12% states that they suffer in this area. The rest are neutral about the role of beauty in their work life balance.

When we analyze the outcomes by country, we see some remarkable differences. For example, whereas Germany, Austria and the Netherlands report a similar level of meaningfulness to their occupations, in the UK workers are significantly less positive about the extent to which their professions are life-fulfilling.

“…. there is a serious connection between one’s level of well-being and the job one does.”

What’s more, these outcomes strongly mirror the respective reported levels of overall happiness in these countries, which means there is a serious connection between one’s level of well-being and the job one does. Finding work that is ‘in sync’ with what makes you tick has a positive impact on your quality of life. People who manage to do so (i.e. ‘my work adds a lot to the beauty in my life’) have a happiness score of almost ‘8.0’ out of 10.0. This figure stands in sharp contrast to those who struggle to find fulfillment in their profession: they rate their level of happiness with a mere 5.5.

One could of course argue that there’s a difference between asking how happy people are with their work and looking at the extent to which the work they do adds to the beauty in their lives. Raising this question has everything to do with the complicated bond between these two high-level concepts. Clearly, the ability to be happy is strongly connected to our capacity to see beauty in the world around us. But, having said this, we immediately see a glimpse where happiness and beauty begin to diverge: the former defines an emotion, the latter a much wider phenomenon that – if dealt with in the proper way – can give rise to this emotion. Therefore, talking about beauty in the context of organizations could indeed open up a new angle in the debate about how the work we do contributes to what some even see as the purpose in our lives: a sensation of belonging.

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Additional information

• More info about Project Beauty is available on the website of the project.
• The questionnaire that is at the heart of the project can be found here.
• If you want to stay updated about the project: follow us on Facebook.
• So far the core survey of Project Beauty has been used for national representative surveys in five European countries. Recently we also started offering an in-company version of this inspiring project. In case you are interested to learn more about applying Project Beauty within your organisation: please contact us.
• Project Beauty was made possible by the generous support of various companies (DRG, SSI Benelux, Blauw Research, Blauw Research Gmbh) and numerous wonderful individuals.
• The development and growth of Project Beauty is sustained with the ‘Seeking Beauty’ gifts: a series of fully personalized (e-)books, based on the core questionnaire of the project, and available for private and corporate gifts. Do you like our venture and are you interested in supporting us: feel free to try out these gifts or contact us!