Wonderbringers Newsletter with Monica Parker
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Hello Wonderseekers!
I’m off to Denver next week for a conference, but this time feels a bit different. To start, it’s the first conference I can remember where I won’t be speaking. Second, it’s a topic that’s more about my future than my past.
For the past 17 years, my career has focused on the workplace. First working for an association that supported workplace professionals, then for various companies as a consultant, and lastly, as founder of HATCH. I have always believed that, given we spend most of our waking lives working, making work better for people has a profound knock-on effect on families, communities, and the world.
While writing The Power of Wonder was a bit of a departure, the research was intended to guide people in finding wonder at work as well as at home. And while becoming more engrossed in the world of wonder, I have at the same time become increasingly concerned with the growing chasm between leaders and the people they lead. (You can find here.) So, I’ve decided that my next professional step is to merge these two areas, researching the ways wonder can make leaders more empathetic, and specifically how the wonder of psychedelics may or may not facilitate that.
[This is usually the point where people look at me like I’m a little insane.]
The current research suggests that classical psychedelics (like magic mushrooms or LSD) make people more pro-social (i.e. make people want to help other people). But what if the data are skewed? What if psychedelics don’t make us better people but instead act as a force multiplier to a person’s existing personality? What if the people who have historically tried psychedelics are more prosocial to begin with, so post-dose, this existing empathetic nature is amplified? And now, as psychedelics become more mainstream (aka: the Oprah Effect), and people with the dark triad traits of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism are trying them, do those anti-social attributes also become amplified?
To put this in the context of leadership, does a good boss on mushrooms become a great boss, but a jerk manager becomes… well, an Elon Musk?
That’s the gist of my research question for my PhD starting in the fall, so I’m off to the MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference to join thousands of others for a week of immersion into the world of psychedelics!
My ‘why’ for the last 17 years has been ‘making work suck less’. That hasn’t changed. But my focus now is less on workplace culture and more on those who have all the power to influence it: the leaders.
How can we change leaders’ minds and change them for the better (and for good)?
Some wonderbringers for me this week:
Can psychedelics make you a more moral person? New study explores the link.
Psychedelic sparks long-term brain plasticity: A single dose improved cognitive flexibility in mice, with effects lasting up to three weeks.
Here’s a look into Silicon Valley’s ‘executive psychedelic slumber parties’ that cost over $3,000: They’re growing in popularity among the startup community and increasingly being used in leadership retreats and coaching.
I’ll be joining a panel this Thursday, June 12th, discussing the use of AI in HR. As I’ve mentioned before, expect me to be the ‘skunk at the garden party’ of a bunch of AI enthusiasts. You can register here.
And please come find me if you will be in Denver next week!
With wonder,
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