Imagine this. You’re a family with members of all ages trying to decide what to do this afternoon. Instead of asking a mix of people, you just ask the two-year-old to make the call. Guess what? It’s gonna be a disaster. No one wants to spend the whole day eating ice cream, just running and playing in the sand, especially not the grandparents or parents.

But, this is exactly what we do when making decisions at work. We pick one lens—business, economy, technical, analysis—and ignore the rest. But there’s a whole family of other lenses out there: emotions, spirituality, community, nature. These can all help us make better decisions.

When I work with communities, especially faith-based ones, I always try to use spirituality in the inspiration and decision making processes.

Using a holistic approach isn't new. Indigenous groups have done it forever. Even in Christian culture, Wesley pushed people to take multiple lenses: Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience (1). He seemed to believe that if all these lenses pointed to the same decision, it had real value.

Of course, the lenses you use depend on your context, beliefs, and culture.

Action question

What additional lenses could you use when making decisions at work or in your personal life? Would nature help? How about spirituality or just plain intuition?

Footnotes

(1) The smart religious people call this the Wesleyan Quadrilateral

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

How I wrote this

This principle draft is based on an audio note I took while walking that was transcribed and cleaned using Audiopen. I then reviewed and improved the text by hand.