GameChangers is a pheromone engine.
Pheromones are chemical triggers given off by animals, humans included, usually in the form of scents that induce certain kinds of behavior such as flight, sexual arousal, aggression, passion, and the herd instinct. Researchers have done a lot of work with pheromones in small animals–bees, bugs, moths, rabbits and so on, and surprisingly little with human beings. The one human study cited by Wikipedia is about menstruation cycles syncing up via pheromones, and there are a number of perfumes and colognes on the market that claim to put sex pheromones into play, but that’s about it.
In the Networked World, humans are in danger of become pheromone-deprived. The technologies that link our minds do the opposite to our bodies. Little by little, our physical behaviors come to resemble and reflect the environment. Cool. Quiet. Scent-less. Taste-less. Touch-poor. Unless a conscious effort is made to counter-balance this effect (as it is at a company like Google for example), the senses that are the most evocative, most linked to experience and human evolution, are neutralized.
This is a new phenomenon. In the entire history of humans’ existence on Earth until the advent of the digital workplace, people worked in environments that engaged all the senses, and usually involved a lot of human contact. This is a big change in the game.
In this highly mediated culture, we define ‘work experience’ as what is written on our resumes.
A ‘user experience’ is what happens with our mouse finger when we look at a computer screen.
A ‘life experience’ is what happens to us outside the workplace.
In the Networked World, a ‘wartime experience’ can mean sitting under a mountain in an air-conditioned room, playing a video game that isn’t for fun, you’re flying a real drone killing real people somewhere two thousand miles away. Then you clock out and go pick up your daughter from dance class. And only when you are driving home with your daughter do you feel anything about the people you killed earlier that day. I’m not here to judge the rightness of wrongness of killing with drones in the name of national defense. That’s a different discussion. I’m saying that killing human beings with the same pheromone level you have when you’re playing Grand Theft Auto?—that’s way out of whack.
Because I grew up on a farm, the contrast between the kind of environments we work in today and how work used to get done is incredibly dramatic for me. Take just one chore we did on the farm—baling hay—for example.
Like many activities on a farm, baling hay is dangerous. If you are young, say ten or eleven years old, and it’s the first time you’re allowed to help, your mom is worried, and it makes you feel brave. Your dad is so stern it sobers you. Your uncle keeps a watchful eye on you, and this gives you confidence. The hay mower might kill a small animal. A rabbit for instance. Part of your job involves removing what’s left of the rabbit from the blades of the mower. It turns your stomach. In a couple of days, when the mown hay has dried, it’s time to rake it into windrows so it can be baled. Your dad lets you drive the tractor pulling the rake. Your heart is in your throat.
If for some reason you fall off the tractor, you’re dead, but that’s not what scares you. What scares you is how angry your dad will be when he sees you’ve let the hay twine around the rake’s power takeoff shaft and it will have to be cut away with a pocket knife. You are given the job of doing this. You cut yourself with the knife. You’re bleeding. Your callous old man says finish the job then go up to the house and get some iodine put on it. The iodine stings. You wince. Your mom hugs you and tells you to be careful. When you go back out to the field, your dad and uncle are looking anxiously at storm clouds in the distance. You feel their anxiety. You’ve got to get the hay baled and in the barn before the storm arrives, or the hay is ruined. Your heart beats faster. You can smell the change in humidity that signals the coming storm as all of you bend together to the urgent task at hand. When you grab one bale of hay there’s a mangled snake that’s still alive inside of it. You nearly jump out of your skin as you drop the bale in alarm. Your uncle laughs.
Not everything on the farm had that kind of compressed sense of drama to it, but compare the haymaking scene to a typical workplace of today, and it’s easy to see what’s missing. All those pheromones. All that emotion. All those senses flooding a body with information, deepening relationships between people and between those people and the earth itself. Life and work, earth and animal, bound up in a haymaking dance.
We are seeing, in the colossal meltdown of the world’s financial systems, just how tragic the effect can be when our work becomes estranged from our humanity. When our actions have no consequences. When they cease meaning anything. At least to us. Somewhere far away, while you’re tapping a mouse and drinking a Starbucks, your drones and your derivatives are killing people. The human equation is out of balance.
Unlike the number of transistors that can be embedded in a circuit, our capacity for being human has not doubled every two years since 1958. Our growth as human beings has not kept pace with Moore’s Law. Far from it. A big part of what we’re missing, especially in the workplace, is pheromones, the chemistry between human beings that stirs our emotions. Those emotions give meaning to our actions. They help make our work consequential.
One of the opportunities presented by the economic crisis is that the work we do will become more consequential. Digging out of the economic malaise and becoming energy-independent…those are huge challenges, with consequences for generations to come.
GameChangers stirs the pheromones and puts them to use. Scared? Good, it will help you focus. Lethargic? Move your body, it will wake you up. Careless? Re-discover why you care. Wake up and smell the pheromones! They’re never wrong.
Tags: Communication, Networked World, pheromone, pheromones, senses, Workplace