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Another World is still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose and now it has gone- and it's never coming back.
We have the power of gods to destroy our home. But we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine,
and by doing so, lay the foundations for a future we would be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn.
What happens if we commit to a world based on generative values: compassion, courage, integrity?
What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves (so we have to do the inner work of healing individually and collectively), between ourselves and each other (so we have to do the outer work of relearning how to build generative communities) and between ourselves and the Web of Life (so we have to reclaim our birthright as conscious nodes in the web of life)?
We can do this - and every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being. We have all the answers, we just (so far) lack the visions and collective will to weave them into a future that works. We can make this happen. We will. Join us.
Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.
If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - future, we need to get to know the people who are already living, working, thinking and believing at the leading edge of inter-becoming transformation.
Accidental Gods exists to bring these voices to the world so that we can work together to lay the foundations of a world we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
Find Manda on BlueSky @mandascott.bsky.social
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/
On FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthor
Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility, and this week we are once again exploring the ways that we might encourage human flourishing, the ways that we might make the thriving of all 8 billion humans on the planet, and the more than human world, central to all that we are and do. It is a core tenet of this podcast that if each of us were able to discover what's ours to do and more importantly, to be, and were supported in the inter-becoming that would arise from bringing the best of ourselves to the table, then we would be well on the way to the transformation that we need to get us through the pinch points of the climate, cultural and increasingly technological apocalypses that are heading our way. So in this week's episode, we're talking with someone who crosses many disciplines in search of eudaimonia, the concept of human flourishing, of finding our best self, that was proposed by Plato and expanded by Aristotle. So it's not a new idea, but we can apply it newly to a world that is very different to the one that they inhabited and Dr Jenna Mikus has been looking at exactly that. Jenna is an engineer and architect by training and is now a consultant and strategic advisor who specialises in balancing architectural science with wellbeing science to promote flourishing health and wellbeing by design across as many environments as she possibly can.
Manda: As you'll hear, she did her PhD during lockdown in the ways that it might be possible to help elderly people find meaning and purpose, in scientific terms, to help them attain self-determination in their lives. And now she's an academic and consultant who acts as an ideas alchemist, helping companies to create environments and experiences for eudaimonia, to support optimal health and wellbeing, to precipitate ineffable emotions like delight and awe. And I encourage you to imagine going into work and feeling awed and delighted at any moment of the day, and how it might transform quite a lot of your life. She aims to promote meaning and inspire creativity, to catalyse belonging and to increase innovation in a world where only doing things differently is going to get us through. She's the founder of the Eudae Group and helped found the Flourishing by Design Community of Practice, which is affiliated with Harvard's Human Flourishing Network. So there's quite a lot of people really giving a lot of thought to this. In a world where the ones who accumulate massive wealth are increasingly leaning towards mass extinction, as if it were something useful in their lives, it is hugely refreshing to explore the ways that we could be differently human, to find the best of ourselves and to live it. So here we go. People of the podcast, please do welcome Jenna Mikus all the way from Australia.
Manda: Dr Jenna Mikus, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this amazing summer's day in the UK? But you're not here, you're in the middle of winter; tell us where you are.
Jenna: Yeah, I'm back home in Melbourne at the moment, so I just arrived a few days ago, I had been in Europe and I decided to come home to rest and reset, even if only for about ten days. So it's short lived for this break, but at least it's a break.
Manda: It's a break and it's winter and it's not 30 degrees outside like it is in most of Europe.
Jenna: Exactly.
Manda: I have to tell the listeners that you were in Europe, and you're going back to a conference in Dublin, and I do not understand how your body adjusts to the time zones. Except it's 10:00 in the morning in the UK, it's 7:00 at night with you, and I'm hoping we catch you before your body just falls over and decides it needs some sleep. So thank you for making the time for this. Because when we arranged it, you were going to be in Bath, which is a lot closer and at least in the same time zone. Anyway, the world is shifting hard and fast climate wise, politically, all of the rest of it. And you are focussed on how we flourish. Specifically, you're focussed on, I'm probably going to say it wrong, but you can correct me: eudaimonia. So tell us what eudaimonia is and how it came to be the core of what you're doing, and all of the conferences that you go to and the speeches that you give and the books that you're writing.
Jenna: Eudaimonia is a term that I came across almost a decade ago now. So I had been working in the fast, what you might call rat race of consulting for almost two decades at that point, based in Washington, D.C., doing different things. At first it was management consulting, and then I fell in love with buildings while on an assignment at the Australian Tax office, about a decade into my career, and decided I want to go back and....
Manda: Wait, wait, hold on, wait, stop! How do you how do you fall in love with buildings at the Australian tax office? You just have to unpick that one for a second.
Jenna: Oh, that makes perfect sense. Yes, I always forget that this doesn't make sense to everybody. It was a newer building and it had lots of natural daylight and composting and things like that, that were just unheard of in American government buildings. I had been in basements that pregnant women were told that they were not allowed to work in, but was absolutely fine for the rest of us to be in. And that was time and time again. The multiple things that we would come in, and it would be a 3 to 6 month project and we would just be thrown in a corner. This is back in the days without Wi-Fi, so we would share one Land cable for ten of us at a table. And then I came to Australia to do this Australian Tax Office recruitment and retention plan. And had I known then what I know now, I could have said, this building alone is going to draw the type of people that you want, and they would stick around if they had a place like this to work and knew of it. And I decided to study sustainable architecture and went back and actually studied at the Architectural Association in London for a nice focussed master's of science degree. And it was really about how you can design a retrofit building so they require less energy. But I was really smitten by the human component. We had a visiting professor from Cambridge and he would talk about, let's really engage occupants, let's motivate them. Let's help them make better decisions instead of just relying on the designers, who won't always necessarily do the right thing. Or owners and operators who will probably be more profit driven than anything else.
Jenna: And so for the second decade, I focussed on more occupant engagement and energy conservation measures, and then eventually got into smart buildings, hoping that that would facilitate better decision making and feedback loops. But instead it just got to be too focussed on, you know, a lot of people wanting to show how much money they have. And I really didn't enjoy the emphasis. And I wanted to start my own company and while on holiday in the UK, I came across eudaimonia and I said, well, if we're design futuring for something, let's design future for this idea of being one's best self. And that's normally the definition that I subscribe to best, for eudaimonia. I was curious to see what it might look like to design with that in mind. And I started a PhD and a company called Eudae Group and together we look at different things that really run the gamut on types of occupants. So different demographics and then types of buildings. So I don't specialise in any one thing like healthcare or education. I really do advisory across the board. So it's thinking about sustainability, but it's also really considering the occupants as well.
Manda: Wow. Okay. There are many threads I want to pick up on this. So eudaimonia comes from Aristotle, am I right?
Jenna: Yes. It originated with Plato, his teacher. But Aristotle really developed it most.
Manda: So can we take a step back in time, to the time of Aristotle and Plato? And so we're talking about Greek men who lived in a society where slavery was considered perfectly normal and women were a subspecies. So presumably this was men becoming their best selves. But did they give us a definition of what they felt a best self was in their time and place, given all of the above?
Jenna: A lot of times it's defined as being action meeting virtue. So really being able to make good decisions and being your best, kind of most virtuous self. So I think in that regard, it was having the right and wrong and hopefully enacting people to make better choices. And yes, I struggle with the origin of the term, and that's why over time I've used flourishing a little bit more generally, because I think it still gets to a little bit of that meaning. But, um, I do also like the virtue based component of that background of eudaimonia, because I think it also just behoves us to think about how we can make better decisions. And if we were to think about something that's along the lines of best self, good versus bad, we don't always really think about that.
Manda: No. But it seems to me that our best self, the good decisions that we make, the virtues that we might espouse, are very frame laden or frame led. In that the definitions of, say, a MAGA supporter in the US of what is good, or a Christian nationalist of what is good, and my definition of what is good, are very likely to be poles apart. And so how do you define a best self for you, for Jenna Mikus? How does it unfold for you? And what are the frames within which the concept of virtue or structured?
Jenna: Yeah, I think that's a really important question, too. And coming from the US and now living in Australia, you can probably understand a little bit of that background, too, which definitely informs my approaches. When I think about best self, it's yes, the good versus the bad, making the right decisions. But it's also being able to be creative and not just rely on science. So it's an art and science approach to design, which is something that has always been really important to me to espouse, this creative engineering approach. I was always a very unusually artsy engineer, is how I put it. So all my degrees are engineering, but I also grew up doing classical piano and singing and dance and things like that. So for me, it's embracing some of those grey areas and the transdisciplinarity and the multi and interdisciplinarity that we really require to tackle wicked problems. And I think society still doesn't necessarily craft itself in such a way to facilitate the creation of those sorts of people. We're still very siloed, and we keep saying they're needed, but we don't have a way to foster that growth. And I think Flourishing intimates a little toward that as well. It's, you know, how can we really think about people who are individual, but if they were to use their own skill set and preferences for different things to do, how might they contribute to the collective and society? So it's not an individualistic term, but it is recognising that people are not cookie cutter versions of humans. It's that nuance.
Manda: Yes, yes. Which resonates very strongly with two things. First, we spoke to someone who's a practising stoic a few weeks ago, and that again, virtue was very much at the centre of that practice. But also, I keep going back to Bill Plotkin and his concept that our culture is locked in early adolescence, but that if we were able to grow up as a culture, each individual goes from early adolescence to late adolescence to adulthood to elderhood. And the critical component is knowing what you're here for. Knowing what is it that I can do best that only I can do? And how do I offer that then to all parts of myself, to other people, and to the whole web of life? How do I bring the totality of my best self to everything that exists? And so checking in that that isn't stepping beyond your concept of eudaimonia, but assuming that it's not, to what extent in the worlds that you move in are people beginning to take this on board? Because this feels to me really critical. If we could help every single human being to want to know what's theirs to do, to help them to find out what it is, and then to give them the space and the time and the bandwidth and the energy to do it, we'd be in a very different place as a species. And we might not be barrelling over the edge of the cliff of the sixth mass extinction, which would be really nice. Does that land in the kind of circles you're moving in, or are people still focussed on how do we make more money?
Jenna: Certainly both. And it depends on the circles too. So I am very involved across a variety of groups. I often joke that as this transdisciplinary person, I am across many different disciplines, practices, personalities, a little bit of everything. And I think it's really important to go against the grain and embrace that discomfort and go talk about something like flourishing, to communities that may not necessarily already subscribe to that opinion. You know, I think it comes down to that background of understanding that there's value in quantitative and in qualitative, and really interrogating some of these subjects in different ways. People are starting to appreciate the storytelling side of things that is so important. And also being able to understand that people are a key feature when they're thinking about how to even allocate the expenditure for owners and operators of buildings. You know, it used to just be if we think about square footage, if we think about energy usage, but now there's such an emphasis on making sure your people are happy, because understanding the value of them being activated and intrinsically motivated, that's really important too. So that also really speaks to me. It's that behavioural piece of how we can explore people, how we can activate them to change. And that's really what came out of my PhD when I was looking at the eudaemonic design of environments. I worked with older adults as an inclusive design approach.
Jenna: And because I was in Australia doing my PhD during extreme lockdown here, it was really interesting to have people play with creative methods. I sent out activities to people's homes to really physically tactilely explore this really strange concept of eudaimonia, in an environment that might facilitate their best selves. But it was interesting because a lot of them came to me without being asked, saying, oh, I signed up for this class! Or I really want to do this better. Or I'm going to get a plant, like they saw my dracaena in the background and they said, oh, I really like the dracaena that you have in the background of your Zoom meetings. And I've reached out to my child and he's going to bring me a plant and we're going to have tea together tomorrow. And it was just really interesting because if you were to design for eudaimonia, the only real theory that talks about how to do so is based on self-determination theory. And that is a theory that consists of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. So three different tenets. And then it's been further studied that if you were to aim for those, that will logically prompt intrinsic motivation. And so when reflecting back, we noticed that it seemed like people were intrinsically motivated, even though that wasn't something I asked them to do, they were just really activated. And I thought that that was a beautiful way of getting back to what was my original goal long ago, in an organic way.
Manda: Wow. Okay. Lots of things to unpick there. I want to come in at the top because we're recording this on the Monday after Jeff Bezos is alleged to have said something along the lines of: 'people are going to die, but the AI is going to live forever, and we need to give the water to the AI. Trying to save it for the people is a complete waste of time'. Which at least they're saying the quiet part out loud; if he said it, I mean you don't trust anything on the internet anymore, but it's certainly been widely reported. And Peter Thiel has been inviting all the super rich to hideaways to work out how to survive World War Three, which is also fascinating. And we intend that neither of these things happen, as far as I can tell, you and I. So we got some paired things that you were talking about. There was quantitative versus qualitative, intrinsic versus extrinsic and the list of things that we need to achieve self-determination. And these all feel like I would like to unpick them. So let's briefly unpick quantitative versus qualitative in this area. You said that for some people this is a different concept to them, so I'm assuming that they are only interested in the bottom line in their spreadsheets and actually you're trying to get them interested in how the people who create that bottom line are feeling.
Jenna: Yes, exactly. And it's really trying to make it an easier decision for them, which frustrates me a little bit. That people are just too lazy to try to do the homework themselves and figure out why this is worth doing. But of course, you know, my job, if I'm brought in as a consultant, is to try to make that a more logical choice.
Manda: Yeah, that's why they pay you, presumably, so they don't have to think. And you do the thinking for them.
Jenna: Yes. So it's also looking at some of the things that have been studied. There is something within Jones Lang LaSalle, JLL, they're a consulting group within real estate and they did a 3-30-300 rule, unlike the tree one that a lot of people know, this one is more about the bottom line in square footage. So the impact to your bottom line, if you think about if you allocate funds towards energy consumption, square footage usage, versus people. And I don't like the ratio. Sometimes people consider it as 1%, 9%, 90%. So if you were to think about where to put your capital in a way that makes sense, 90% in your people, that's really just the best way to think about how best to allocate funds and focus and prioritise your efforts. Now that is a very quantitative way of thinking about it. But I also think it's really important to get to know the people. And this is where the qualitative side comes into play. It's understanding that nuance, what's really motivating people? And are they even in the appropriate roles for that position that they're in? And that's where I kind of like the behavioural side of things, too, and getting to know the inner workings. And sometimes job crafting that comes with this.
Jenna: If somebody is in a job that they don't love, how we can actually even change their environment. So with spatial, but also organisational and layer some of those components into it and get to know the people so that they can also maybe stretch and do something beyond what even their day to day job might be. And hopefully they can make better decisions. Because I think no matter the type of company that I might work with, it behoves everybody for them to make better, more sustainable choices. And so it does touch back on that emphasis for me. So it's a matter of also what's going to resonate, because we know only one perspective sometimes is going to be heard by certain people. So it's trying to present ideas and logic in different ways and just seeing what actually might stick and get somebody to do something. But it's not always obvious.
Manda: No, it sounds like it sounds like a minefield, actually. At the top of that, you mentioned the tree model that people know of, and I think I don't know about the tree model.
Jenna: I don't know it well, I just know whenever I look it up lately for JLL that the tree one comes up and it's something about the allocation of trees within cities, and there's a recommendation on what to fulfil.
Manda: Oh okay.
Jenna: I would have to look it up to say.
Manda: Okay, no worries. No, no that's fine. At least we know roughly what area. Trees in cities are good and there's probably a critical mass of trees that is the ultimate optimum.
Jenna: Precisely. Yes. I should look this up at some point.
Manda: That's so sad. I just think everybody should live in a tree house. Okay, so then intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. Talk to us about that in your world and how it works.
Jenna: So intrinsic is really just having somebody be activated of their own accord. They are not told to do something. They really just feel a desire to do it. And that's very different, if you think about a child or a student who is learning something, and you compare it against those that are really just curious and love math. And they want to just do it because it's just what drives them versus the student who is being harassed by their parent to do well with extrinsically motivated ideas of, you know, well you'll get extra dessert tonight if you do well on your math test. And this has been studied, of course, especially among the positive psychology groups and things like that. And there are pros and cons of each of these. But if you can really get into the intrinsic motivation side of things, then people really have skin in the game, you know, they want to see something succeed. And hopefully that would precipitate better choices and better actions going forward. So I find that really interesting, especially if we're trying to get people to do things, do better things, little by little.
Manda: Yeah. And feel good about doing it. Because the point as I understand it about intrinsic motivation, is it's fun and it feels good, whereas extrinsic motivation can actually often be quite suppressing, depressing impact.
Jenna: Yes, it is kind of a compression and expansion idea, right? Yeah.
Manda: Yeah. And you realise after a while that being offered another gold watch by your company, whatever, it doesn't make you happier. You know, we're watching the world's first trillionaire who's living evidence of the fact that you can have another rocket to go to Mars and you're still actually not a happy human being. Whereas if you had intrinsic motivation, then fulfilling whatever it is that your motivation is driving towards feels really good. And one of the things that I learned at Schumacher a while ago, and I want to check if this is still believed to be the case, was that you had a kind of what we would call a seesaw, and the Americans would call a teeter-totter, where if your intrinsic motivation goes up, your need for a desire for focus on extrinsic motivation goes down. So as your capacity to feel fulfilled in yourself and to be your best self rises, your your interest in what size car have I got and what size house have I got and how much money am I earning? And what holidays do I take? And all of the things that are social markers of success, but extrinsic, goes down. But conversely, if somebody pushes those social markers of success up in your salience, then your tendency to focus on intrinsic motivation drops. Is that counterbalance still considered a thing?
Jenna: Well, you know, I've heard about that a little bit, but I haven't really seen that enacted in any specific way. I do know that there is a visual in one of Deci and Ryan, they're the two people who really have studied self-determination theory. It's Edward Deci and Richard Ryan and there is a continuum. And it was along the lines of extremely intrinsically motivated on one side and extremely extrinsically on the other side, and that there is a bit of a crossover that happens and there are different gradations as to how that can be activated. But I've not really heard much about the seesaw teeter-totter take on it. I'd be really curious to look into that with more intention.
Manda: Okay. It's the common cause foundation. I will find links and we'll sort that after the conversation.
Jenna: I love homework, it's always fun.
Manda: Yeah. It's fun. And it did make a lot of sense when I heard it. But it is ten years old now, so it may be completely out of date. Okay. Self-determination theory; autonomy, competence and relatedness. Talk to us a little bit more about what that is, what they are, how they might manifest in a working world.
Jenna: Yeah. So autonomy is more along the lines of choice. So it's doing the type of work that you wish to, when you want to and how you want to. Which makes sense if you're thinking about working from home. This was such a key aspect of working from home during Covid, that people were trying to balance out, again, that intrinsic/extrinsic motivation of, you know, my boss is constantly asking where I am; there's clearly no trust. And really, I just want to do what I want to do. And as long as I'm being productive, then that's great. Which is already a bit of a minefield there, as how do we define productive?
Manda: Exactly. Yes.
Jenna: But having that idea of flexibility and choice is key. And then we go beyond autonomy and we think about competence. Competence is really just doing what you do well and being able to focus on that and grow naturally. So developing mastery. So I really like using mastery for competence, because I think that that definitely gets to that idea of growth rather than just being good at what you do. It's being good at what you do and then getting even better. And getting a little bit more difference and nuance as you go, so that you're making it more interesting for yourself and for others. And then relatedness is the third component. And how I think about it is along the lines of relating on your terms, as you wish to. So it's a little bit of that autonomy side of things, but it's how you're actually interacting with people and with yourself. And I also really like, there's a gentleman named Frank Martela who's at Aalto University in Finland and he's a happiness expert, because Finland is always the happiest country. And so he collaborated with Deci and Ryan at one point to tack on a fourth element of self-determination theory, which is beneficence. And so we can think about relatedness as being not only self and others, but also nature. How do we relate to the earth? And then with beneficence, it's doing more; it's giving back. And it's kind of getting into that nature relationship and relatedness component.
Manda: Wow. And they are devising ways to measure this and then to help people expand into it? Is that what's happening?
Jenna: Yeah, it's very well studied. Self-determination theory is one of those things that is really excellent to choose to design for, because it's such a developed theory in terms of measurement. There has been measurement and it's been studied across contacts like typologies, if you're thinking about education, health care, etc., and across demographics in cultures. And that's what's really remarkable, that it it really has resonance, no matter gender, age, whatever. And so that was another reason I thought that was a great thing to hang our hat on, if you're designing for something. I don't know how much has been measured in terms of the beneficence concept. I know that is still a bit theoretical and was written about maybe, I would say seven years ago or so, and I haven't heard too much about it since. But I really like it because of the sustainability slant to it and it takes self-determination theory beyond an individualised perspective.
Manda: Right. And also beyond an anthropocentric perspective into the 'we need to connect with the web of life', which in the circles that the podcast usually connects with, is a given. But it's interesting that it possibly hasn't moved into the more academic side of business concepts or design concepts yet. It would be interesting to see how that could be made to happen, but then you're probably the person to make it happen.
Jenna: Hopefully one of many. We'll see how many people we can get on board with this, yes.
Manda: Yes, yes for sure. And just purely for curiosity. So Csikszentmihályi has done all the work on flow states and mastery in flow states seem to me quite intimately linked. Is that an overlapping concept with self-determination theory? Are flow states an integral part of that, or are they often on some other academic limb?
Jenna: Well, they're studied within the same field. So positive psychology or what luckily has now been termed as well-being science, because of the toxic positivity slant. And people were thinking positive psychology was that, which it wasn't necessarily.
Manda: I don't even know what a toxic positivity slant is. Hang on a second. What's toxic positivity?
Jenna: So it's being ridiculously positive and forcing that upon other people.
Manda: So a kind of denialism of 'the world is wonderful!
Jenna: Everything's wonderful. And if you don't think it is, that's your problem, sort of thing. Yes. So it's of course this toxic interpretation. And so because of that...
Manda: Yes, yes. Okay.
Jenna: It's a little bit more well-being science. And so I tend to subscribe to that. But within both positive psychology and well-being science communities, because they are overlapping but then still a little bit separated, they do have groups that study flow.
Manda: Silos.
Jenna: I don't know how much that's actually been aligned with deliberation with self-determination theory, which of course would make sense if it were. For me I tend to think of them in a similar but different vein. In fact, Penny Hay, who we've spoken to, Dr Penny Hay
Manda: Yes. Coming on the podcast soon!
Jenna: Yeah, she'll be on the podcast soon. Professor of imagination at Bath. I was in touch with her because I think that it's really interesting to design for flow and we need to be able to consult with people who are specialists in different sorts of emphases. So imagination for her, Nick Sorensen, also a professor there in improvisation, and then other flourishing people. So I think it's very interesting just to see how we can actually curate environments to facilitate the experience of flow. And to date, that's primarily been studied among jazz musicians. When people are just playing together, which is a key reason that I wanted to work with Nick for his improvisational skills, because he is a saxophonist and studies improvisational theory very intently. And I think if we get into that point of designing for flow and then designing spaces for flow, and then of course organisational systems for flow, then we can build upon self-determination theory. I don't know the necessary alignment between it all, but I think that they're building blocks, which would make sense to build upon.
Manda: Okay. And so where we keep looping back to where we want to go to next, is that you are actually designing buildings. Built structures. I hate to say the built environment because it feels like kind of a buzz phrase, but you are designing the places that people go to work in order to maximise their sense that the world is a good place. How do you do that? What does it look like? What does it feel like? What are the components, if you were to design an ideal building? And I understand that it depends what it's for. But pick anything that you feel good about and tell us what you are looking at and how you would design you, and then how you would retrofit, or the other way around. Either.
Jenna: Yes. So when it comes to this, it of course is very layered, as you're saying, because it is. It's never easy. Normally when I'm brought in, it's because people are at an impasse. They know they need to be making better decisions and doing healthier buildings. They just don't know where to begin. So I'm an advisor, a research advisor for the International Well Building Institute, which is IWBI. They oversee the well building standard, which is kind of like a Breeam for health and well-being. And so I build upon that knowledge. So it's a little bit of architectural science for health, but then I interweave it with the wellbeing science side of things. So we can think about how we can activate. And it's not just occupants, it's the different types of people around the design table. So if we have the architects and engineers, sometimes just getting them to talk and think slightly differently than just meeting the brief and doing the bare minimum to do so. And half the time that is really just revelatory. You know, being able to think about how we can do this differently if we're doing a hospital project. If we're wanting something that's going to be interesting and facilitates surgery and those sorts of things, that again, bare minimum. But if we think beyond that and look at things like Roger Ulrich studies in the 1980s, where people who had views recovered more quickly, it's kind of weaving some of that in and making sure that we can really think about the patients for their recovery and their follow up and things like that.
Jenna: And then their families. And especially families who might get bad news. It's how we can allocate space to having those conversations, which are oftentimes completely forgotten and overlooked. But then not just thinking about the patients, thinking about the people who are there all the time. So nurses, doctors, everybody, administrative staff and understanding what their key bugaboos are that they really want to be able to address, to make their lives a little easier every day, so that they can care for patients. And there's a really interesting study that Laurie Santos, she is a happiness professor at Yale, and she has a really great podcast called The Happiness Lab. But she always talks about a study that was done in, I think it was a cancer centre or cancer ward, and it was a janitor. And when interviewed about the importance of his job, he said that it's really important. He knows that he is one piece of the puzzle in what is contributing to people and their cancer recovery. And it would seem mundane and not a great existence for a job to a lot of people cleaning up things like vomit sickness, things like that. But he felt that he was giving back and that was his role to play. And so making sure that you can just consider all those different perspectives in a lot of these design approaches. And you did mention retrofits versus new builds too, right?
Manda: But let's just dig into what you just said a little bit, because it feels like there's a huge number of viewpoints to take into account, and there's always going to be a financial constraint, because we do still live within the cesspool of predatory capitalism. So who makes the decisions about what has priority when it comes to the design? Or are you able to go in there and create a design on time, within budget, that then takes into account the patient's, the family, the surgeons, the nurses, the janitors, the support staff? There's so many different views in there. And some of them must be connected and some of them must be diametrically opposed.
Jenna: And I think this is where the quantitative versus qualitative perspectives really plays in. Because you can't always do the business case of it, of why this is compelling. You know, we can point to studies that are done and we can do some math that is maybe interesting and helps make a decision a little bit easier. But this is where the qualitative storytelling really comes into play. And depending upon who you're speaking with, it's getting the ear of the people who you think this sort of idea would resonate with. Most of my work is very much strategy across engineering and architecture. I joke that I was trained as both, but I'm neither. I'm kind of the strange person across these different worlds. And I primarily work with people in the c-suites. So, you know, the CEOs, the CFOs, all these people who do hold the purse strings and make the decisions. But what I think people forget is that a lot of times these C-suite members are human; they want to make the right decisions in many cases. I mean, I'm normally brought into ones where people want to choose to do better instead of the ones who just don't really have any interest in flourishing. Then of course, I'm probably less likely to be part of that conversation. But it's working through together and trying to present it in different perspective ways that might work.
Jenna: And to me, I think it's really fascinating to see the people who are the ones who are helping to push the message forward. So sometimes it's a head of sustainability. Lately, now that we have more along the lines of healthy buildings, those sorts of people do focus more on the humans involved rather than just one entity. Sometimes they'll even think about more than humans, so I love those people who are the human focus, but also more than humans. So how are we going to impact the bat population with noise and those sorts of things. It's trying to figure out where my in is, working with those people to collaborate and go from there. Just see what good we can do together to make it better. Whether it's a retrofit and we're working through something that already exists, or if it's new build. But to do new build, it has to be pre pre pre design, like very early, because once it gets going, it takes on a life of its own with the process. So it's really hard to make change once plans are made and just the machine gets going. It's almost easier to do retrofit sometimes.
Manda: Right, I can imagine. Okay, again, my brain is firing in many different directions. Let's go back to something I put in my notes a while back because I want to get back to it. We are discussing how to make humans feel good at work, in a world where the people who are running the AI want the AI to be doing all the work. Which is one of those... I occasionally think, why am I still here? Because given the trajectory that the people who think they are gods of the universe are taking, there is no role for humanity in their future world. Except them. You know, they want the machines to be doing the work, and therefore people become redundant and they really genuinely, if what was reported at the weekend is true, do not care about billions of people dying. In fact, they'd probably be quite relieved if we did. And yet we are still here. So somewhere along the line, the Gods of the universe are perhaps not the gods of the universe, which would be very nice. But the AI apocalypse does seem to be aiming to take jobs from people quite fast and at all layers of the tree. I could quite believe that there will be quite soon robots that could do surgery better than people. If you get enough inputs, it's one of those things where a little bit of fuzziness is better than the lot of fuzziness when a surgeon loses concentration. It's really hard to hold concentration for eight hours flat, which is why they do it in teams. But even so, there are things where I could quite readily see that a machine will do it better. And then very soon you get to so why do we need surgeons? Well, we need surgeons to operate. No we don't. Maybe we need them to make decisions? Maybe we don't. Reports from young people going through medical school, are that they're largely being taught now how to read the AI, what prompts to give it, which terrifies me, because I always thought that good medicine is as much art as science, and the art will not be there. Leaving that aside for an entire other conversation, how are the people that you're talking to? Because you just spent a while going around conferences, you're about to hit the conference circuit again. Is this a resonant conversation, or are we behaving like ostriches and just sticking our heads in the sand? You know, la la la, we can't hear you. There is no AI. Or are people beginning to design? Because what you just said is, (sorry, I'll stop in a minute!), that there's a very long design process and it takes a lot of time. And one of the things that I feel about now is that we are accelerating towards a number of crisis points. Some of them are biophysical climate tipping points, some of them are sociological. You cannot have the trillionaires sucking all of the money up to them for very much longer, and some of them are technological and sociological in that. What are people for, if it's not to do the jobs that they have been doing? And there's a whole other conversation about where people are designed to do jobs in the first place. It's a very capitalist thing. But leaving that aside, where is the AI conversation going in terms of wellbeing and eudaimonia?
Jenna: It's still very new. And last week I was in Oxford at a leadership for flourishing event. And we did touch upon AI a little bit, but I was one of maybe two designers there; most of the people were business folks who were thinking about how we can actually support people, you know, their coaches. But I think that there's hope if we can balance out that art and science of design and that is really how I present Eudaimonic design. It's intimating towards that. And there are different ways that we can think about how to design for eudaimonia. So within the PhD, when I had the output of the study, it was this need meeting element. So you think about self-determination theory by designing for those three elements. It very much was about satisfying people's needs: they felt like they had choice, they felt like they were able to have mastery, and they were able to engage on their terms when they wished. But if we were to think about how to design for the complex construct of eudaimonia and just being one's best self, and something that was a little bit different, then that was almost this ephemeral, like the ineffable was able to be designed for. We can think about things like flow and even aspects of light, that aren't necessarily just light and vision. It's, you know, thinking about something that we can't always put our finger on.
Jenna: So I've been building on that with some of the AI informing, whether it's pedagogy or usage in everyday practice. So that we can understand that there are different ways that we can go about it. We can use it to meet needs, but we can also use it to perhaps design for the ineffable and again, appreciate the the two sides of the art and the science. And not just have something that's boring, really just contract laden approach, that's not going to really get us to where we need to be as humanity. And that's another thing that I was chatting quite a bit with Penny about, Dr Penny Hay, because of that idea of when we're actually educating students, especially within design, it is this transactional approach. And a lot of times they're going home and they're doing a homework and throwing it into AI, and they come out and they wonder why they're not learning anything. And so it's about teaching how to think and going beyond. And I think that that difference makes all the difference. If we could just have something that's going to be guide rails and then also perhaps a nice North Star. And that's where again, things like eudaimonia and best selves, I think really helps to establish that end goal vision.
Manda: Okay. And Penny is professor of the imagination. And the one thing that AI seems to be crushing is the capacity to imagine, which is a muscle like any other. If you don't stretch it, it doesn't work. Okay. So, you were just talking about designing for the ineffable; I think we have a title for the podcast, which is just gorgeous. Talk to me a little bit about the ineffable. Let's go more deeply into that. What is it? And in a world where that was given space, I'm forever heading towards thrutopian stepping stones and it feels like what you're talking about are key parts. If we can bring them in at scale and in time, that they could make a huge difference to business. So that's where I'm heading, but tell me a little bit more about designing for the ineffable and how could we lock that in, in a world that seems as if there are some people still racing for profit alone?
Jenna: It is a process. And it's something that we only realise when reflecting back after facilitating the whole PhD study. And I don't even know what led me to do it when I was designing the study. Because I was thinking, oh, well, if they say that you should just design for self-determination theory, to design for eudaimonia, I could have just left it at that. But it felt like something was missing and I was curious to interrogate what that might be. Because it's, again, very transactional, you don't want to just design for this and this and this and think that that's going to encapsulate everything. It's never that easy and too prescriptive. So I thought it would be interesting to juxtapose these approaches. So I had everybody design for first autonomy, then competence, then relatedness. And then after considering those, then shifting over to just think about, well, if you were to just design a space for your best self, what might that entail? And that's where we had conversations about flow and light. And I'm still really curious to check this out across cultures, because that was with an Australian demographic where light is very important. So I'd be curious to see is that the same elsewhere? But it's just the things that people don't always think about or say, but perhaps their most driven by, and they just need to kind of get out of their heads to think about what that might be and articulate that and then design for it. So I think there's a lot of potential there.
Manda: Okay. Why is light important to Australian demographics?
Jenna: I think it's just because there's so much sun here. It's definitely a high sun society. I mean, apparently the hole in the ozone is over Australia somewhere too, so that's a whole other issue. But yeah, I don't know. Especially with the older demographic, a lot of people have said that sun is even more important, not just because they're older, but because older Australians grew up loving the sun, being outdoors, being at the beach. To them, it had this alignment with being outside and fun and play, which is another great idea. So the ineffable, like it touches on all those different facets.
Manda: And the younger demographic are more inclined to cover up because of skin cancer? Is that why there's a demographic difference?
Jenna: Yeah.
Manda: Okay.
Jenna: Exactly. There's a there's a campaign in Australia called slip, slap slop. Don't ask me what they all mean, but it's like, slipping on clothes, slapping on a hat and then slopping on sunscreen. It doesn't sound very exciting but it's important. We need to protect ourselves from the sun.
Manda: Absolutely. Okay. Let's not go further down that track. It's terrifying. Okay, we've got about a quarter of an hour left to go. We keep alluding to your PhD. So first, before we go down the other tracks I want to go down, just tell us a little bit more. So you were doing it during lockdown and you were getting people to self-design their environment or their concepts? Just tell us what it was, because it sounds really exciting actually.
Jenna: Yes it was. So I started in 2019. We moved to Brisbane, Australia, which is a very sunny place. And I was trying to figure out how to interrogate Eudaimonic design and just designing for eudaimonia, because I felt like there was potential there. And, you know, the world needed more of these design futuring goals that made sense and would actually make something that's going to be about activating change. And when I was exploring different ways of approaching the problem, I attended a design for all week, and it was primarily for my husband to be able to network, because he does work with people with disabilities. And ironically, when I was there that week, I found it to be really just enlightening. Because if you do inclusive design properly and if you design with older adults, taking into account lived experience, you can essentially design for all demographics. And so starting then, I started thinking maybe I'll work with older adults. That wasn't really part of the plan, I'm not a gerontology specialist, but they're often overlooked anyways, and we need to design for things that are beyond the 18 to 30 year old white males that are commonly designed for. So I liked that that was also an emphasis. But when it came down to where, the type of environment that I would like to design for, Covid basically made that decision for me. So a year in, I had to do a confirmation seminar, which presented my idea of what I planned to research and here's why. And that was April 1st, 2020. And we had just started lockdown and I had to re-evaluate everything and make it all virtual. And because everybody was at home during lockdown and it was basically a place of everyday living and work that seemed to be a great way to do it.
Jenna: So I focussed on residences, but not in a residential necessarily capacity. It was residences as a little bit of everything. And when working with the older adults across Australia, because it was virtual, we were able to do things a little bit differently. So I established rapport with them early on, doing one on one interviews so they weren't too overwhelmed by what I was asking them to do, when that time came. And then once I got to know them, I sent out what is called cultural probes, which is really just a nice little gift basket of activities to do. So it would come in the mail, they could do them at home, and then they would send them back to me. And then after that, I met with them again individually to make sure that I was interpreting what they provided back to me correctly. And then I brought them all together to do co-design workshops online. And that's when we started thinking about how we could design for self-determination theory, eudaimonia, building on their past references and their present as well as their future goals. And so that was really beautiful to explore together in different groups and then individually. So that's what resulted in a set of principles for Eudaimonic design, but was more about not just that practice component, but the intentionality of praxis, because we found that by designing for safety or self-determination theory, people were intrinsically motivated. And so really, it just comes down to engagement and doing it intentionally. And yeah, so that's why Eudaimonic design is a bit of a mixture; it's praxis and practice.
Manda: And how do you measure a level of a person's intrinsic motivation? Do they self score? Is it like measuring pain where you've got smiley faces and unsmiley faces and a range in between?
Jenna: Yeah, I guess you could. I didn't measure it necessarily. It was more just reflecting back and seeing that they were activated to do things that I hadn't asked them to do. And also going beyond to tap me on the shoulder and say Jenna, I really wanted to share this with you. After we spent a 2.5 hour long workshop call together, they would email me or call me and say, oh, I wanted to just tell you this. So they went out of their way to really share, which was nice.
Manda: Okay, so you've got a kind of living practice. You've got qualitative rather than quantitative. I love that. Okay, and then you've come home for a couple of weeks from Europe to Australia; that's still blows various fuses in my brain; and you're writing book number five, is that right?
Jenna: Yes. It's the fifth in a series. It's not my fifth book, but it's the fifth in a series and it's transdisciplinary work. And it's within a group that's by these two women who oversee it in Holland. And it's always looked at different types of work, it's very academic, but my approach is bringing together practitioners and academics to interrogate Flourishing by Design at work. And especially unconventional contexts. So I wanted to think about, again, healthcare as a workplace, education as a workplace, not just commercial offices. And then think about how we can get into the behavioural side of things and recognising the importance of governance and systemic design that's going to actually help people and beyond, hopefully, the planet, in ways that are just a little bit beyond the day to day job requirement. So we're looking forward to that. We have 33 contributed chapters right now, which is basically two volumes.
Manda: And are you editing it then?
Jenna: Yes, I'm lead editing it.
Manda: Wow. Jenna. Okay. I won't use up too much more of your time, but we have almost ten minutes. So I'm going to talk to Zach Stein in a few weeks time about education. I've been listening to quite a lot of education podcasts in order to be able to think more coherently about education. And it seems that certainly in the worlds that I've been listening to, the current educational system across the globe is basically broken and has been for a long time, because it was built on a 19th century model designed to treat people as if they were cogs in a machine. It was designed to create uniformity of thought and action, and the capacity to still do the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic under pressure, when you're a colonialist out somewhere where people might not be wanting you to colonise their land. Can you still send accounts home and destroy cultures? And that's not what we're at anymore. And we are living in a very rapidly changing world. And the question of how do we foster the next generations and help them to flourish seems to me absolutely critical to the survival of humanity. There is a level at which what any individual is for, is to lay a foundation for the next generation to live a more flourishing life. And I'm not seeing us peg that one too well at the moment. So in your designing for education, how do you do that so that the staff and the students, the people in there are all going to flourish? In a world where I'm guessing you don't get to go to the Minister of Education in any given country and go, mate, you're doing it all wrong; you need to redesign your entire way of thinking about education. Which would be, I imagine, actually the starting point for getting a properly flourishing educational system. Yes? No?
Jenna: Yes. Yeah it makes perfect sense. And that is one of the reasons I'm really active in different advisory groups, because there is a chance to be able to have change that would hopefully be policy driven. And that does help, but it is normally even siloed in how those things are accomplished. So for example, I'm a global commissioner for air quality, and so that's been something that has been really great to see some traction in regards to schools and places like that, because cognitive function, of course, is really enhanced by better air quality. And so we've had some really good feedback and resonance with healthcare and with education, because it helps with recovery and with just teaching and learning. So that's been one thing. But again, it's a siloed approach. To actually get people on board and I think to really just transform education for, again, that creative engineering sort of approach to life, I think that we need to embrace the art and science of design and teach how to think more openly. Not how to think, but how to think and imagine and play. That really is where we're going to have some difference. And if we're thinking about AI, it's not just how do we architect this prompt that's going to give me this? It's how can I actually engage with technology in a way that's going to support society and what needs doing, in a way that's actually going to be transformative. And I think that side of things and the potential there is the one thing that I find a little bit helpful and positive, but I know that there are a lot of people who don't necessarily follow those guide rails. So it's going to be an ongoing challenge to figure out how can we have the guardrails in place to guide, but then not completely overexert and do an extrinsic motivation thing, telling people what to do all the time. So it's going to be a difficult line to walk, I think.
Manda: Yeah. In a hypothetical world, how would anybody engage with the technology, all the technology but principally AI, in a way that is Conducive to the future flourishing of the whole of the web of life? Because I am increasingly seeing it as antithetical, not because it's antithetical in and of itself, but because the people running it, as far as I can tell, are now genuinely set on on a world where the average non billionaire is a waste of space and using up oxygen, water, resources, that they would prefer we not use. How can we teach people? How can we ourselves interact with the technology in a way that is regenerative and flourishing?
Jenna: I think we need ground up activation. People need to be calling for things that have more legitimacy and actually will have that potential to be more real, instead of just something that ticks the box. Because if we're lazy and we don't demand a difference, then we're just going to be given what we're given. So I think it's the collective Activation, it's the demanding more. My husband calls it Justice Jenna. So if I get really frustrated, it's how we can actually make things better. I think it's just encouraging people to question.
Manda: It sounds like you're calling for revolution there.
Jenna: There you go. It is a little.
Manda: It's at least a conceptual revolution rather than an actual revolution. Yeah. I was speaking last week to Sylvie Barbier from the Second Renaissance. And one guest on this podcast a long time ago said revolutions just turn you in a circle where you are, and what we need is a renaissance. We need something that is fundamentally different values being laid as our baseline. So as a last question, because I am aware that it's now very late at night where you are. In the worlds in which you move, and I recognise that you are one of these amazing people who's able to be very Polymathic, are you seeing the shift in value systems embedding that would take us to a world where flourishing of the human and the more than human world is beginning to become that for which we are genuinely striving, rather than just another greenwash statement in a document?
Jenna: I do worry about the greenwashing. With wellbeing washing and now flourishing washing, certainly. And I think that's why I also really try to emphasise the value of Flourishing scholarship, because it is very well studied, whether you consider it as positive psychology, well-being science, happiness studies, it really runs the gamut. But it's being studied very formally and rigorously at key institutions worldwide. And I like the rigour of that, but I think it's important to apply the rigour pragmatically. And that's why I still also like to bridge those academic and industry worlds, because that's really the only way that we're going to move forward. But I think there certainly is still the tendency to have these huge dichotomies of the people who just don't care at all about flourishing. They consider it to be unicorns and rainbows or something completely ridiculous. But again, if we emphasise the scholarship side of things and how it can actually change people, systems, societies, then sometimes their ears will perk up and they'll start to listen. And then we have the people who are very much on board and I find that heartening, like being at Oxford last week with the leadership for Flourishing community. They together are really coming together to support each other and spread the message out there. And so they're one group and then my group Flourishing by Design within Harvard's Human Flourishing Program, we are only two groups of I think maybe 10 to 15 now. And we all focus on something slightly different of flourishing. So sometimes there's justice, there's education, there's work, there are different people looking at it in different frameworks and contexts. But I find that to be really heartening and I'm hoping that by cross-pollinating some of those groups into some of my more engineering design architecture groups, that will enliven the debate and hopefully get people to do things a little bit differently and better.
Manda: Brilliant. That feels like a very good place to end. Unless there was anything else that you felt you wanted to say to podcast listeners, then I think we should let you head off to your Australian night time.
Jenna: Thank you. No, I think we touched upon so many things, that was wonderful.
Manda: Thank you. All right, in that case, thank you Dr Jenna Mikus for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast.
Jenna: Oh it was lovely to be here. I so enjoy your podcast so thank you for having me Manda.
Manda: Well, there we go. That's it for another week. Enormous thanks to Jenna for coming online quite late in Australia while she is still in the midst of jet lag from buzzing around the world with an energy that leaves me awed and inspired and quite exhausted just thinking about it. So thank you, Jenna, for this and for bringing the ideas of human flourishing to such a wide audience in so many different places. Jenna had just been in Holland. She's going to Dublin, she'd been in Oxford. She's going to various other places around the world to share the ideas that human flourishing matters. And not only can we choose to support it, but that choosing to support it is going to make the whole world a better place. Integral to this is the concept that we don't get human flourishing if we don't have the flourishing of the rest of the ecosphere. So this is a thrutopian concept. How do we bring people to the best of themselves in the understanding that the best of ourselves involves our being an integral part of the web of life? And what's really inspiring about all this is the concept that people can imagine buildings now, that would change the way that we think and feel. Whoever we are, however we work, there are better ways of doing things than little brick boxes with tiny windows looking out at other brick boxes with tiny windows. Breathing in air that is dampening our capacity to think. Drinking water full of PFAs. All of those things. It's possible to do things differently, and people are already imagining this.
Manda: So there is hope. As our world wheels ever faster towards the breakdown of the existing system, knowing that there are green shoots growing towards a better system is always encouraging. So please do go and have a look at the links at the foot of the show notes. And otherwise we will be back next week with another conversation.
Manda: In the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot and for this week's production. Thanks to Lou Mayor for producing the video and managing the entire YouTube channel. To Anne Thomas for the transcripts. To Faith Tilleray for wrangling with the tech when it does not give her a sense of human well-being, and for all of the conversations that keep us moving forwards. And as ever, an enormous thanks to all of you for listening. And a huge thanks to those of you who came to Sunday's gathering, who explored what it is to walk the path of the inner warrior. It does take a huge amount of courage and that sense of what it is to be virtuous, that Jenna was talking about; exploring our own inner worlds without judgement, with grace, with generosity of spirit, with integrity, feels to me one of the most virtuous things we can be doing. And it is hard. So thank you to those of you who had the courage to try. The next gathering, Becoming a Good Ancestor is on Sunday 13th of September on Zoom, 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. UK time. And you are all welcome. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.