Trust and Whole Selves

This video is worth a watch, I think. John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods, makes some great points about people in organisations.

At its simplest, viewing people as ”Human Resources” gets it wrong because it limits. It ignores the idea that people come to the workplace wanting to bring their whole selves.

It ties in well, I think, with Matthew Syed’s (not wholly groundbreaking) ideas about cognitive diversity. Ethnic, cultural, religious, gender and every other “born” diversity seems obviously important to the workplace. In the main for moral reasons, but also in part, and more cynically, for reasons of optimisation. Cognitive diversity, by contrast, is just “people who think differently”.

What I like about this “whole person” approach is that it looks to naturally and gracefully maximise that cognitive diversity.