FUTURE TALENT November - January 2019/2020 | Page 53

ON TOPIC
Exploring the philosophy of work at
Deloitte Ventures UK
To clarify how the mindset applied to work
affects thinking and decision making, in 2018,
Deloitte Ventures UK engaged Brennan
Jacoby’s company, Philosophy at Work, to
run a series of “strategic learning sets”.
Based on the idea that “if it matters, it
should be understood”, the workshops help
people look at purpose, culture, values,
innovation and strategy, and dive deep into
how they play out in the workplace.
Participants read a hand-picked book and
use philosophical enquiry to make
connections between the text and group’s
work. Jacoby describes the approach as
bringing together “the best bits of a book
club and the agility of an ideation sprint”.
Over three sessions, 15 senior leaders
from various Deloitte teams, including HR,
learning and development, strategy,
innovation and ventures, and market insights,
read Mindset by Carol Dweck, which
investigates how people tackle problems,
approach skills learning and develop
resilience. Discussions brought together the
group’s professional experience with a
philosophical approach that challenged
their thinking.
Catherine Wallwork, Deloitte Ventures
UK’s head of innovation engagement and
mindset, says the workshops “were
invaluable in informing narratives, strategy
and designing experiments for innovation
engagement and mindset. But I believe the
value was not only the insights but the
process of bringing people together who have
a shared purpose to solve a real-life business
challenge and the experience and connection.
it leaves the group with,” she adds.
Spend time reading about
what’s going on outside
your bubble
Saïd Business School in Oxford, takes
business back to a place the ancient
philosophers, concerned with the
workings of the world, would have
approved of.
“It’s only over the past 60 years that
this notion that the one purpose of
business is to make money has arisen,”
he says. “Business needs to conceive
itself as a way of producing profitable
solutions to the problems of people
and planet. The best businesses do
exactly that.”
Wilberforce-Ritchie adds that
philosophy, by its very nature, enables
businesses to think far into the future.
“Philosophy is about connecting
the future with the present,” he says.
“Often companies hire a management
consultant when they want to deal
with a particular problem and that may
give a quick fix – maybe one or two
years of financial growth. But the
reason so many firms are seeking help
at the moment, 20, 30, 50 years into
their life, is that they haven’t looked
long term. One thing you learn from
philosophy is how to deal with that
future now and prepare for it .
Philosophy brings up sustainable ideas
that we can embed now to gain
future benefits.”
This concept of a wider role for
business brings up another key
philosophical idea – ethics. Roger
Steare, visiting professor in the
O
practice of organisational ethics at
Cass Business School in London, has
worked as a consultant to many big
companies, including BP, Nationwide,
Barclays and RBS. He is scathing about
what he sees as a kind of corporate
myopia in this area.
“Most businesses operate on a
pretty poor combination of Newtonian
determinism –  understanding the
whole by reducing it into its component
parts – and a feudal, medieval mindset,
which gives rise to command-and-
control structures,” he says. “So, you
have people not thinking about how
those parts fit together and get a poor
foundation for traditional business,
which is at odds with a world facing
catastrophic changes in terms of
climate, environment , societ y
and politics.”
He highlights the September 2015
diesel-emissions scandal in which
Volkswagen engineers programmed
engines on its cars to activate their
emissions controls only during
laboratory emissions testing. This
enabled the vehicles to meet US
standards during regulatory testing
but emit up to 40 times more nitrogen
oxides in real-world driving.
“That was not only about climate
change, it was about respiratory
disease,” he asserts. “The number of
people who have died preventable
deaths as a result of nitrogen oxides
is significant. When people manipulate
software to cheat emissions tests,
they’re doing it to comply with financial
targets. They don’t see or understand
the systemic effect of their actions on
other human beings or on our
ecosystem. They are saying that the
question they are being asked is, ‘how
are you going to achieve your target?’
and the answer is to do this without
considering the knock-on effects.”
P
eople in business often
baulk at taking responsibility
for what they see as wider,
global problems, such as
climate change or social and political
unrest, saying that these are matters
for government or NGOs to consider.
This is an argument that Professor
Steare hears often.
“After I’ve picked myself up off the
floor, I say to them, ‘are you a slave? A
child? Do you not have a conscience?
Don’t you care about your own family
November – January 2019 // 53