What does all this high-flying text about my life mission mean?

When I say...

My life mission is to identify and make visible the subtle ways of cruelty and evil ...
















...that cause the majority of the unnecessary and unproductive human suffering...







- and enable, encourage and incentivise institutional and transformational change to decrease that suffering.























There is unnecessary and unproductive suffering in the world due to a series of mismatches between 
  1. What people think they should do
  2. What people think they do
  3. What people want to do
  4. What people do

...this is what I mean:

While it is relatively easy to spot obvious acts of cruelty and evil in the world (e.g. Hitler's actions during World War II, rape, murder, child abuse, etc), I believe actually the majority of unnecessary pain in the world is caused by cruelty and evil that we as a society do not properly identify - and hence passively overlook, endorse and enable. Examples of this include 
  • Allowing children to bully each other at schools - and adults in work places
  • Hiding behind an illusion that non-action is okay since hey, you're not doing anything (e.g. not speaking out and defending someone/something that you know is being neglected) - not practicing our obligation to dissent, confront and act when we see things that our values recognise as not right
  • Mixing oranges (e.g. freedom of speech) and apples (e.g. egos that are out of control) to enable uncivil, unproductive and short-term focused "societal discussion" 
  • Incentivising people with restricted empathy skills to take on leadership roles in businesses and other organisations - and not expecting them to grow in that dimension

As you can read from the examples, all of this deals with complex system-level phenomena. The problems cannot be solved by simplistic black-and-white thinking, rules or judgment of "the other side". They require profound systems intelligence, realistic compromising, as well as will to actually do something about it.
My focus is in the above mentioned actions that cause pain which is 
  • unnecessary, meaning that it is not contributing to any meaningful end - it exists simply because of our stupidity, laziness and/or ignorance (e.g. a talented young man giving up a career in dancing because of his family and friends who constantly keep questioning whether dancing is a manly enough vocation)
  • unproductive, meaning that it is not part of the productive process of growing as a human being (e.g. a child being told that he cannot throw toys around, getting totally pissed off, throwing a tantrum and learning that he is not omnipotent), but rather unproductive and sometimes even outright tragic (e.g. a child getting mentally/physically abused and hence not being able to grow a healthy sense of self-value)
I don't want to just describe the phenomenon - I want to actually do something about it. That is why I have chosen a path that aims to combine the relentless analytical thinking of the academic world with the get-shit-done attitude of the business world. In plain English this means that I am doing institutional/societal entrepreneurship projects to change the way things are.

Let me give you an example from my current #1 project that aims at re-institutionalising the concept of leadership. An example of the "unnecessary and unproductive suffering" from this phenomenon - suboptimal leadership - could be the fact that we discourage people with a strong will and skill to do what's right (in addition to their skill of getting things done) from aiming at top management positions. I believe there are two primary mechanisms through which a change can be created to this issue:
  1. Change the way we teach leadership in schools, universities and special leadership programs. We need to create a new leadership paradigm that concretely and profoundly demands skills in e.g. empathy, listening, genuine interest for the topic (instead of ego-based ambitions to advance one's own position) and practicing the obligation to act according to our values. These skills are just as concrete and critical for good leadership as some other more mechanical skills that we are used to measuring (e.g. assertive decision-making, powerful presentation skills, effective process management, delegation, etc). The fact that we don't have widely accepted measures for them, does not mean they are any less real or important - it merely means that we do not know how to, well, measure them (yet).
  2. Change the way we incentivise leadership in businesses and other real-life  organisations. A big factor driving suboptimal leadership practices in today's real-life organisations are the incentive mechanisms that are in use: they place greater value on short-term performance of a single unit/team/individual (and his/her ego...), than on whether the organisation/unit/entity's primary purpose is being fulfilled - i.e., whether they are actually doing what they're supposed to be doing. I believe there is a huge amount of improvement potential in changing the holistic incentive systems (incl. monetary compensation, official status development, recruiting for leadership positions) of existing real-life organisations.
All in all, I believe much of what I can contribute to the world has to do with making sense of people's actions, intentions, wants and needs - and the interaction of the four. My strength lies in being able to see through people's seemingly counter-intuitive actions and dig deeper to understand why their wishes and dreams are far away from their self-inflicted "should's" and "must's" - which once again are far away from the reality of action.
Sound intense? Well, that's just the happy little whacko I am!