Looking for an innovation injection and a business boost? Philosophy can be transformational

In brief

    Philosophy is a discipline that helps us to make better sense of the world — including business

    Apply some critical scrutiny to your own beliefs and the values that underpin your business

    A mission statement is useful guiding slogan, but purpose speaks to the values that underlie it

Too often, business leaders dismiss philosophy as a trifling dalliance. But actually it could be the path to overcome all sorts of business problems, both large and small.

I’m going to hazard a guess that you’re at least a tiny bit cynical that philosophy might not have anything to offer your business. Maybe even more than a tiny bit cynical.

But the thing is, you’re already doing philosophy. Every time you think about ideas, what they mean or how they fit together, every time you reflect on your values to help guide decisions, every time you formulate an argument, every time you tackle an ethical dilemma, you’re doing philosophy. The question is: are you doing it well? And could you be doing it better?

Philosophy isn’t just the musings of long dead white guys. It is a discipline — a set of thinking tools — that helps us to make better sense of the world around us.

Twentieth century British philosopher Bertrand Russell spoke of the power of philosophy to challenge assumptions and to cut through prejudices, habitual beliefs and the unexamined dogma that passes for common sense. To the degree that our decisions are informed by our beliefs and values — or by unexamined common sense — then we might benefit from having a clearer understanding of what those beliefs and values are.

One of the primary applications of philosophical thinking is critical examination of the assumptions we hold about the world. Philosophy encourages us to wonder how things could, or should, be different.

We all normalise the world around us, transforming from the wide-eyed children marvelling at the strangeness of the world to complacent adults who take the way things are for granted. Yet if we allow ourselves to become stuck believing there is only a single way of thinking, or one way of doing things, then we constrain the kinds of decisions we can make, and this can often have detrimental effects on responding to the challenges posed by a dynamic business environment.

Innovation boost

According to John Armstrong, who spent several years as the philosopher-in-residence at the Melbourne Business School, taking assumptions for granted can also stifle innovation.

“When we see step changes in an industry it’s often because someone has come up with a much better insight into what you can offer people and what they might want. We often think of that as a marketing or creative issue, but it’s basically philosophical: what is the good, what is the kind of happiness that we are offering as a business,” he says.

A crucial step in understanding the way we assume the world to be is to clarify our beliefs and values. Often our beliefs and values are buried just under the surface of our actions, directing our behaviour even though we might struggle to say precisely what they are.

Socrates was famous for teasing out the implicit ideas buried in people’s judgements, often surprising them with how fuzzy and inconsistent they were. While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend practicing brand of dialectic in the workplace — it’s a great way to make new enemies — there is value in employing some critical scrutiny on your own beliefs and those that underpin your business.

When he was philosopher-in-residence, Armstrong ran a series of events that sought to encourage reflection on hidden beliefs and the fuzzy ideas that inform them.

“The key thing is trying to get clear about our ideas, particularly when those ideas have a kind of inbuilt messiness to them,” he says.

Armstrong recently put this process into practice when he consulted for a design firm that was struggling to understand its values and communicate them effectively to clients. Its existing mission statement was bland and generic, and didn’t represent what truly motivated the business.

“They were really struggling to get big contracts, because they were struggling to explain how their design could grip their client’s imagination.

“Their aim wasn’t to do it on the cheap, but to produce a product that people really wanted. And they were losing out because they couldn’t convey, in a really compelling way, what it was they stood for.

“Despite being architects, they were really unimaginative about what they were offering. They had just never thought about it, so they couldn’t communicate it. They couldn’t work out what it was, about what they loved, that they wanted other people to love, and they became really dumb when they wanted to talk about it. So that meant they couldn’t sell the best of themselves to the big developers they wanted to work with.”

Armstrong used the tools of philosophy to successfully help them uncover the values that really motivated the business and then how best to articulate them to clients.

There is research that shows longer-term profitability is far better inside an ethical organisation rather than a non-ethical organisation.