You better think!
Tags: Culture, Responsibility, You Better Think, Clever Systems, Automation

We invent increasingly complex systems to control the smallest details of our lives. But raising foster children has taught me that we sometimes need to discard the system and trust in ourselves and others.

Whenever I get on the bus there is a sudden change in the other passengers. They watch closely. Ladies clutch their purse, men involuntarily touch their pockets to check their wallets and phones. It happens in a split second but it is unmistakable: they are worried. All of this is not because of me, it is because of the person walking next to me, the person I’m taking to his appointments. He’s a young man in his early twenties and he has a certain look in his eyes that lets people know he doesn’t play games. But there’s more to him. He has been in my foster care for some years now.

I’ve cared for underprivileged and delinquent youths for 20 years. These kids often have a history of abuse and neglect. They grow up in families that struggle with domestic violence, substance abuse and criminal behavior. From a very young age they face some of the ugliest aspects of life. It is a tough start to a difficult life.

The people on the bus don’t know this background when they see him. To them he is just a potential threat to an otherwise uneventful commute. I can understand why the passengers are wary. I even caught myself the other day checking my purse when a stranger stopped aside me at the biking traffic light. I felt ashamed when I notice doing this myself, but that stranger doesn’t know that. All he sees is rejection. To compensate for my behavior I give him an extra smile. And when I do so I think I read in his eyes: “Woman you are way too old for me!”

It might be surprising but there are parallels between caring for these kids and office life at Schuberg Philis. Although the people involved and the problems they face couldn’t be more different, the basic human emotions that drive our actions are exactly the same. No matter if you are fighting to survive in a violent home or if you are a bright developer from a respected university working your first real job: we all long for safety and security and for a chance to realize our potential.

We all look to make our world manageable. My foster kids often try to control their chaotic worlds by trusting very few people and relying only on themselves. They find their safety in independence, even though they need help more than anything.

People tend to build systems and implement regulations to make our world manageable. Systems make the world predictable and reliable. They give us a framework to follow: do things a certain way and everything will be just fine.

Systems really are great for learning and to bring structure. If we have a system to trust for our the daily, basic needs, we can free our mind to be creative. It works this way with my foster children and it works exactly the same way at Schuberg Philis.

But both my foster children and the people at Schuberg Philis have shown that systems aren’t always the solution. No matter how well-intended, systems can be detrimental to growth. My foster children have been stuck in systems that were devised to help them. People at Schuberg Philis have been frustrated by systems that were built to ease their workload.

I’ll give you an example. Just the other day I was working on a new appraisal tool at Schuberg Philis. It’s a tool we’ve designed to encourage our team members to give feedback to their colleagues. As part of the testing phase, my two colleagues and I were interviewing a test user. He stated that he had only used the tool after he had received six email reminders.

The building team was excited about this feedback: clearly this meant that every user of the tool should be emailed every day. Reminders give us that little nudge we all need, right? The team started to discuss building a system that would solve this problem.

Just in time we realized we were close to making a big mistake: we were about to build an unnecessary system. It hadn’t been our goal to build a system that sends daily reminders, we wanted to build a tool that people actually want to use. After all, our philosophy is centered around personal freedom and responsibility. Daily reminders don’t exactly fit into that. We quickly abandoned the idea of automatic reminders: people are more than capable of deciding how often they want to be reminded.

It takes courage to let go of a system, because it means giving up control. Not everyone makes smart decisions. People can get in trouble. But that’s what responsibility and trust is all about.

A free thinker knows when to embrace a system and when to discard it. Bad systems absolve us from our responsibilities and limit our creativity. A bad system can stop us from finding that revolutionary idea. Good systems on the other hand are reliable and effective and they give us the freedom to use our minds to do great things. Good systems enable us to learn and grow. At Schuberg Philis we try to tear down as many bad systems as possible. We only build the ones we believe are truly good.

I’ve seen what the freedom to choose means at Schuberg Philis and I’ve seen what it means to my foster kids. When people’s lives are not ruled by systems, they take responsibility. They learn from their mistakes. They are empowered to be creative, to think boldly, to cooperate with others and to find solutions that improve our lives and the lives of those around us. Those are the strengths that people need, no matter where they come from.

Lotta Croiset van Uchelen