Committed Flirtation

Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips observes that “people tend to flirt only with serious things—madness, disaster, other people.”^{[10 ]}When we craft experiments, we are flirting with our many selves, a serious endeavor because it matters so much to us. The stronger the attraction, the more vulnerable we are to biases that affect how we perceive alternatives. Since we are not neutral about which outcome we prefer, we can fall into the trap of evaluating our experiments with a positive bias, one that encourages us to escalate commitment, even when we have evidence that it would be better to abandon ship or put the pet project on hold.^[11] A related danger is inadvertently putting a current work situation at risk. The exploration feels risk free, because we hide it from work associates. But the project becomes all-consuming, and it becomes obvious to everyone around us that our attention is divided.

Mark Böllmer, a thirty-five-year-old Swiss manager working on a side project for a business in the area of socially responsible investment, gave himself one year to make a decision about leaving his corporate job. He started with a careful plan, outlining which benchmarks would tell him whether the business was worth pursuing. But, of course, we can never know what twists such projects will take, and he did not make any of his own benchmarks by his self-imposed December deadlines. By June of the following year, he was still working every spare moment to make his side project come to life.

After university, during his postgraduate engineering work at the prestigious École Polytechnique in Lausanne, Mark concentrated on environmental issues, going on to a local engineering firm to continue such work. There he wrote a guide to corporate environmental audits with a friend who eventually left to work in South America at an NGO. They worked day and night on that project, one of the most rewarding of his career. After three years and a desire for more hands-on experience, he moved to a large Swiss electricity company as the director of international projects, where, among other things, he started socially responsible projects in the field. But the managerial track he found himself on required him to move next into an operational role, which, since he worked for a large multinational firm, meant an expatriate assignment.

I’m in international projects, so the next step for me is to go into an operational role. The truth is, the idea of being a corporate guy at fifty just doesn’t excite me. I’ll pay the bulk of my salary in taxes and spend all my time involved in office politics. I’m not even sure I have what it takes to get to the top. I read in a study that the average age for starting a business in Switzerland is thirty-six. I’m thirty-five. I got married two years ago. We don’t have children yet. I don’t have a lot of constraints yet. It’s now or never.

When his coauthor on the environmental audits report returned to Lausanne, they decided to join forces and started working in their spare time to create a business linking corporate responsibility indices with company performance information. Following this strategy, they would be in the database management business.

The idea has evolved with work and market testing. We tried to form a relationship with a firm that would provide the data for the portal, but it wanted to distribute the information via existing online brokers and to hire me to do that work internally. That defeated our purpose. Now we’re trying to create an assetmanagement company, through the development of funds. The dream is to become a real brand and to create a lucrative business. But I’m worried that as it moves more toward asset management, I’m getting further and further away from my area of expertise—international projects and environmental engineering.

Experiments are inherently dangerous, though necessary. Like Mark, when we follow our passions, we also risk escalating our emotional commitment to a new course of action before we have evidence that it will be doable. On the other hand, the perpetual dilettante dabbles in a great variety of possibilities, like our would-be history professor, never committing to any and never crossing any off the list.

In between lies a stance of “committed flirtation,” in which we hold ourselves to a rigorous search while withholding allegiance to any given alternative until the evidence that it will work is in. Ben’s use of the experimental method is an example of committed flirtation. Starting with a “what if” question, Ben generated ideas and leads for possible avenues, testing and refining his developing notions about what he wanted to do next. It took several iterations, over a period of three years, to arrive at “the answer,” but each step generated variety and feedback and suggested the next.

There is much we can do to adopt this experimental stance and adapt it to our own circumstances. In fact, probably the best barometer of our readiness to make change is whether we are willing and able to put a cherished possible self to the test. Leaping without a net is foolish. It is better to start by trying out a possible new role on a small scale—in our spare time, on a time-limited sabbatical, or as a weekend project.