Evolution made humans lazy and pessimistic.
I recognise that this is a deliberately provocative way to begin a blog about workplace wellbeing, and it is not literally true – but I wanted to draw readers into a reflection about common wellbeing myths and why they are so persistent.
Human beings are clearly capable of extraordinary effort, optimism, generosity and persistence. We climb mountains for no obvious reason, run marathons when nobody is chasing us, spend years acquiring qualifications that require significant sacrifice and routinely commit ourselves to causes that matter deeply to us. Teachers, in particular, often give enormous amounts of themselves to children and families without anybody needing to ask them to do so.
So describing human beings as simply lazy or pessimistic would clearly be nonsense. However, there are two aspects of our evolutionary inheritance that, I think, help to explain something I have become increasingly interested in: why some of the myths surrounding workplace wellbeing are so intellectually sticky.
Why does the idea that less effort must mean greater wellbeing feel so intuitively attractive? Why do we so readily assume that easier work will make us happier? Why does more money appear to offer such an obvious route to greater happiness? And why, in organisations where many things are going well, can one difficult interaction, one unsuccessful initiative or one negative comment dominate the conversation?
There may be something very human going on.
We were not designed to waste energy
Daniel Lieberman, Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, has written extensively about what he calls the exercise paradox. Human beings evolved to be physically active, but we also evolved in conditions where food was often scarce and acquiring it required effort. Under those circumstances, wasting energy unnecessarily would have made very little sense.
If there was no reason to run, why run? If you could sit rather than stand, why stand? If an essential task could be completed using less energy, conserving that energy for when it was genuinely needed was a sensible strategy.
In evolutionary terms, conserving unnecessary effort was not laziness. It was adaptive.
The difficulty is that the environment in which we now live has changed considerably faster than we have. Food is relatively abundant, physical effort can often be avoided altogether and the demands placed upon us are very different from those experienced by our ancestors. Yet the attraction of conserving effort remains. Anyone who has debated whether to go to the gym after a long day at work probably understands this without requiring a detailed explanation of evolutionary biology.
There is something here, I think, that has relevance beyond physical exercise. When presented with two possible states, one requiring effort and the other requiring less, the easier option has an immediate intuitive appeal. That helps to explain why one of the most persistent wellbeing myths is so attractive: that less effort must somehow be better for us.
If work is demanding, reduce the demands. If people are tired, make the work easier. If something creates pressure, remove the pressure.
There will, of course, be occasions when precisely those things are necessary. Excessive workload is damaging, chronic overwork is unsustainable and no argument about purpose should ever become an excuse for expecting people to tolerate working conditions that are unreasonable. I made that argument in my previous blog on strategic care.
But something else is also true.
Effort is not inherently bad for us. If it were, there would be no Olympic athletes, Nobel-winning scientists or entrepreneurs who devote extraordinary amounts of time and energy to difficult goals. An entirely effort-free working life would not be a fulfilling one, because effort is often part of how we experience achievement, growth and meaning.
We also notice what is wrong
The second part of my deliberately provocative title concerns pessimism. Again, pessimism is not quite the right scientific description. What psychologists have repeatedly observed is something closer to a negativity bias: negative events and information often attract more attention and carry greater psychological weight than equivalent positive ones.
I prefer the phrase negative noticing because it captures what this can feel like in everyday organisational life.
Imagine that a school leader receives twenty messages during the course of a week. Nineteen are broadly positive and one parent sends a particularly critical email. Which one is that leader still thinking about while brushing their teeth that evening?
Most of us know the answer.
There is an obvious evolutionary logic to this as well. Our ancestors did not survive because they were particularly good at appreciating an attractive sunset while failing to notice movement in the bushes. Threat mattered. Something potentially dangerous required immediate attention in a way that something pleasant often did not, and the individual who repeatedly ignored signs of danger was unlikely to prosper.
So our minds became rather good at noticing what might be wrong.
Again, the environment has changed, but the tendency remains remarkably familiar. Twenty things can go well in a school and the conversation in the staffroom can still be dominated by the one thing that went badly. A lesson can contain many successful moments, but the teacher goes home thinking about the child they did not reach. A headteacher can receive considerable positive feedback and spend the evening mentally composing a reply to the one person who complained.
An organisation can make significant progress and yet the attention of everybody within it becomes fixed on the remaining difficulty.
There is a survival logic to negative noticing. There is not necessarily a fulfilment logic to it.
Perhaps this helps explain why the myths are so attractive
This is where some of the conventional assumptions around wellbeing begin to make more sense.
If we are naturally attracted towards conserving unnecessary effort and naturally predisposed to notice what is going wrong, then a particular version of wellbeing becomes very seductive: less work, less pressure, less challenge, more comfort, more money, fewer difficult conversations and fewer things that make us feel uncomfortable.
On the surface, this appears entirely rational, and some of it matters enormously. Pay matters. Fairness matters. Workload matters. Rest matters. People need financial security and nobody does their best work while permanently exhausted.
The mistake is to assume that if we continually maximise comfort and minimise effort, fulfilment will necessarily follow.
I do not think human experience supports that conclusion.
Think about the achievements in your own life of which you are most proud. I suspect relatively few of them involved doing something extremely easy. Passing an examination, completing a degree, learning to teach, becoming a school leader, raising children, running a marathon, learning an instrument, helping to turn around a struggling school or supporting somebody through an extremely difficult period of their life all require effort.
Sometimes considerable effort.
The things that give our lives meaning frequently demand something from us, which suggests that there is another side to our human inheritance that matters just as much.
Fortunately, we can imagine a different future
Human beings do not simply respond to what is directly in front of us. We have an extraordinary capacity to imagine a future that does not yet exist and to organise our behaviour around bringing that future about.
We can picture ourselves completing the degree. We can imagine what the school might become. We can see the child reading fluently before they can do it. We can envisage an organisation in which people work differently together and decide that this imagined future matters enough to justify the effort required to get there.
Psychologists describe this capacity as prospection – our ability to represent possible futures and allow those imagined futures to influence what we do in the present.
This complicates the simple story that human beings merely seek comfort and avoid effort. We may avoid effort when the effort appears unnecessary, but we can also pursue it when we believe it leads somewhere worthwhile.
There is some fascinating research around what has been called the effort paradox. Effort is costly, and people often seek to avoid unnecessary effort, yet effort can also add value to an outcome. We may value something more because achieving it required persistence, sacrifice or difficulty.
That feels highly relevant to education.
Very few people come into teaching because they want an easy life. They enter because they want to do something that matters.
That does not mean workload does not matter. It does not mean leaders can appeal to vocation whenever they want staff to work harder, and it certainly does not mean exhaustion should ever be regarded as evidence of commitment. But it does mean that the relationship between effort and wellbeing is much more complicated than the conventional wellbeing conversation sometimes suggests.
The important question is not simply:
How much effort does this work require?
It is also:
What is the effort for?
Purpose changes the meaning of effort
This takes me back to an argument I introduced in my previous blog: hard work does not automatically undermine wellbeing, whereas purposeless work often does.
The distinction matters because purpose provides a connection between present effort and a worthwhile future.
A teacher may spend considerable time helping a child who is struggling to read because they can imagine the difference reading will eventually make to that child’s life. A leadership team can work through an extremely difficult period of school improvement because they have a clear sense of what the school could become. A member of staff may persevere with a complex pupil because they believe that pupil can succeed.
The work remains hard. Purpose does not magically remove tiredness or emotional strain, but it changes what the effort means.
This is why I think purpose has to sit much closer to the centre of the workplace wellbeing conversation. If leaders focus only on reducing effort, we risk responding to one part of human nature while neglecting another.
People need rest and recovery, but they also need challenge, achievement and the sense that their effort has mattered. They need to be protected from unnecessary workload, but they also need the opportunity to contribute to something worthwhile. They need to be listened to when something is going wrong, but they also need help to recognise what is going right.
Leaders cannot change human nature – but they can design for it
This is where the argument returns to strategic care.
School leaders are not going to remove our evolutionary tendency to conserve energy, nor are we going to eradicate negative noticing. In fact, I am not sure we should want to. Both tendencies can be useful.
Negative noticing helps us identify problems. Energy conservation encourages us not to waste effort. There is wisdom in both.
The leadership challenge is to ensure that neither becomes the organising principle of workplace culture.
If the dominant question becomes “How can we make this easier?”, we may gradually remove the very challenge from which achievement and fulfilment emerge. Equally, if the dominant organisational conversation is always about what went wrong, people can lose sight of the progress their hard work is producing.
Strategic care therefore needs to work deliberately with, and sometimes against, these natural tendencies.
That does not mean pretending everything is positive. It does not mean encouraging people to ignore problems, and it certainly does not mean telling exhausted staff that they simply need to rediscover their purpose. That would be another form of simplistic wellbeing.
Instead, leaders need to design workplaces in which unnecessary effort is challenged while purposeful effort is valued. They also need to create organisations that are sufficiently honest to identify what is going wrong while being disciplined enough to notice what is going well.
That latter point may be more important than we sometimes realise.
Schools are extraordinarily good at identifying gaps. We ask what the pupil got wrong, which group underperformed, which part of the lesson could improve, what the data tells us we need to address next and what the improvement plan should focus on.
There is good reason for all of this. Improvement requires us to identify the gap between where we are and where we want to be.
But if we are not careful, organisational improvement can become an institutionalised form of negative noticing. We constantly look for what is missing and then wonder why people feel as though nothing they do is ever quite good enough.
Strategic care requires another discipline alongside improvement: noticing success.
I do not mean false praise, manufactured positivity or pretending that weak performance is strong. I mean deliberately helping people to see the connection between their effort and the progress that effort has produced.
The child who can now read something they could not read six months ago matters. So does the family whose relationship with school has changed, the attendance that has improved, the colleague who has grown in confidence, the behaviour that no longer dominates the classroom or the school that feels different from the one people walked into three years earlier.
These things are easily absorbed into normality. Once improvement happens, yesterday’s success becomes today’s expectation, and leaders can move immediately onto the next problem.
That is understandable, but it can also be costly.
Leaders therefore have an important role in helping people look backwards far enough to recognise how far they have travelled. Progress makes effort visible, and visible progress helps reinforce purpose.
There is hope
So perhaps evolution did leave us with a tendency to be a little lazy and a little pessimistic. More accurately, it left us inclined to conserve energy when effort appears unnecessary and to notice negative information particularly readily.
Neither tendency makes us defective. Both made sense in the environments in which they evolved.
But neither has to determine how we design modern workplaces.
Human beings also have the capacity to imagine a better future, to decide that future matters, to organise behaviour around achieving it and to work extremely hard when the effort has purpose.
For school leaders, this has significant implications.
A culture of Workplace Fulfilment cannot be built simply by making work easier, but neither can it be built by exhorting people to work harder. It requires a much more considered approach.
We need to remove effort that serves little purpose, while protecting the effort that is necessary to achieve something worthwhile. We need to connect necessary effort clearly to what matters. We need to recognise and support the emotional demands inherent in meaningful work, and we need to help people notice the successes that their hard work produces.
That, for me, is strategic care.
It is not about designing a workplace around our desire for immediate comfort. It is about designing one that understands human nature well enough to create the conditions in which people can direct their effort towards something worthwhile.
Perhaps that is why purpose matters so much.
It gives us a reason to get off the sofa.
I am currently developing these ideas through my forthcoming book on Workplace Fulfilment and through my work with schools and trusts through Laviss Education Consultancy.
