The Mental Elf, dead cert source of a sense of belonging? (But is it elfy?)

God forbid you should be normal ... let's all come together in the cult of hyper-individuality ... and how it all relates to a Value Proposition.

When I started my career in Sales and Marketing back in the late-1960s the office was a straightforward place. You arrived, you worked, you went to the pub afterwards if you fancied it, and nobody asked you about your "work-life balance".

The closest thing to corporate wellness was the first-aid kit in the filing cabinet and the annual company sports day, an event that was mercifully optional and, even if attended, also ended with the obligatory trip to the pub.

Now, of course, it’s completely different.

Not least, Wellness is a VIBE - that’s my acronym for Very Important Business Element. I guess it needs to be because I discover that almost one in four people of working age in the United Kingdom (the actual figure is 23 per cent) are registered as disabled (GOV.UK).

Think about that - it’s astonishing, isn’t it? Nigh on one in four people officially recognized as disabled. But what is meant by ‘disabled’? Well, apparently, the UK’s Equality Act 2010 considers someone disabled if they have …

a physical or mental impairment that has a substantial and long-term negative effect on their ability to carry out normal daily activities.

So, on that basis, a quarter of all working age people are actually registered disabled, but, from numerous discussions that I have recently had with business people, it seems to me that, even if they are not ‘registered’, a lot more are expressing concerns, particularly when it comes to their mental health.

What is going on?

(Photo at top is copyright © Shutterstock)

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If you are an Aargh! by David Pinder regular you may already know that my particular topic when talking about Business is the Customer Value Proposition, and I often repeat the point (here it comes again!) that the value in a value proposition is the value in the customer experience, not the value in the product.

People can find it difficult to accept this notion. They assume that value is something that a business enterprise creates and delivers to its customers. Not so. Customer Value is the value perceived by the customer. It is a subjective assessment made by the customer.

Here’s a simple thought experiment to demonstrate the point:

On the 20th October 1888 artist Vincent van Gogh wrote a letter to his brother, Theo. It included this:

I cannot help it that my pictures do not sell. Nevertheless the time will come when people will see that they are worth more than the price of the paint.

How right he was! The irony behind this plaintive statement is that, earlier that year, van Gogh had painted the first images in his Sunflowers series. In March 1987, one of those images sold at auction for $39.85 million.

So, who created the value ...

… was it van Gogh?
… or was it the buyer?

The kicker that follows on from this is the fact that a business enterprise may not know, may not even be aware of, some truly significant aspects of the value that causes specific customers to make particular purchases.

In fact, Peter Drucker, a giant of management theory and practice in the 20th century, went so far as to state the following in one of his last books:

The starting point for management can no longer be its own product or service, and not even its known market and its known end-uses for its products and services. The starting point has to be what customers consider value. The starting point has to be the assumption – an assumption amply proven by all our experience – that the customer never buys what the supplier sells.

What is value to the customer is always something quite different from what is value or quality to the supplier.¹

Okay? Keeping that in mind, here’s another sometimes-not-considered point …

… Employees are equivalent to Customers …

Which is to say, Employees are in trading relationships with their employers. The obvious deal is the work-for-pay contract, but there is more to it than that.

Consider the ‘arrangement’ that exists between a business and its employees.

I started this post with a comment about the Product Age work situation … why was it like that then but not now? What changed?

It all has to do with the business of Value Creation & Delivery. Throughout most of the 20th century Customer and Employee Value came from an understanding that a firm’s value delivery was directly derived from profitable production and, consequently, a leading KPI was the sales volume resulting from that production.

This meant that the most powerful functions within a business were Production and Finance and a key measure of success was sales volume. This was the age of “Sell! Sell! Sell!” and the kind of transactional salesperson so memorably imagined by playwright Arthur Miller:

He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back – that’s an earthquake ... A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.²

So, how did this all translate into leadership style for the Product Age? It can be summed up in one word, Militaristic, and was very much a reflection of the 20th century world. This was ‘chain of command’ management. What’s that? Well, it was succinctly described, on 13th August 1942, by General Bernard Montgomery, when, in Cairo, he addressed his troops a couple of months before the decisive World War Two battle at El Alamein:

I want to tell you that I always work on the Chief of Staff system. I have nominated Brigadier de Guingand as Chief of Staff Eighth Army. I will issue orders through him. Whatever he says will be taken as coming from me and acted on at once.

This is the way businesses were run. This is why the various levels of upper, middle, and lower management and supervisors existed. It’s why so much business language still refers to ‘targets’ and ‘campaigns’ and ‘sales forces’ and the like.

There’s only one snag - the world changed. Radically. That world no longer exists, but I don’t believe all of the management issues and KPIs have been appropriately re-thought. In fact, part of the problem seems to be that technological advances have made it possible - indeed, easy - to measure everything in and out of sight … but that isn’t always a good idea! Just because you can measure something doesn’t necessarily mean that it is useful so to do.

The militaristic system was complicated but both Customer Value and Employee Value now come from a far more complex set-up that requires a far more engaged and intimate set of relationships with the workforce.

Which brings me back to the issue of Wellness.

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Why has Wellness become such a VIBE? And why is there such an emphasis specifically on Mental Wellness?

I’m guessing that part of the answer to that last question is simply because physical ailments are usually more visible than their mental counterparts. You can see the broken arm and comprehend the limitations that it creates for the affected individual. But when somebody says they’re depressed, you’re not necessarily sure how to respond.

Before saying anything further, let me clearly state that I have every sympathy for those who are mentally troubled or disordered. And a condition may be so weighty that it is only right and proper that it is given official acknowledgement in the form of registered disablement.

But, let’s face it, a lot of mental ups and downs, including mild and moderate depression, are just parts of normal life and, anyway, don’t forget that although we only ever seem to hear about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), there genuinely is its opposite, post-traumatic growth (PTG).

This is hardly a new idea: more than two millennia ago, Cato the Elder expressed the view to his Roman contemporaries that he worried about the weakening of the will if there was too much (by which he seems to have meant any) comfort or ease.

And, if you’ve ever seen the 1951 movie The African Queen, starring Humphrey Bogart as Charlie Allnut and Katherine Hepburn as Rose Sayer, you may recall the following exchange between them:

Charlie Allnut: A man takes a drop too much once in a while, it's only human nature.
Rose Sayer: Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.

That’s the sense of it. It is not a contradiction to say that we humans exhibit both enormous strength and extraordinary frailty. And we can also be suckers for group-think, often without even being aware of it.

But hold on, I’m getting a little ahead of myself there! I’ll come back to this point but, first, it strikes me that it might be useful briefly to address what seems now to have become a ubiquitous term - neurodivergent.

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I just looked up ‘neurodivergent’. What does it mean? The first definition that appeared online informed me that it has to do with …

differing in mental or neurological function from what is considered typical or normal

Hmm. Okay. If the definition posits itself as being different from ‘the typical or normal’ I guess we’d better look up ‘neurotypical’, hadn’t we, so that we can at least understand what it is not?

Here’s what came top-of-page when I requested the meaning of ‘neurotypical’:

There’s no such thing as “normal” when it comes to the human brain. That’s because brains are infinitely complex, and no two brains can ever develop and work exactly the same. Instead, experts looked for patterns in how brains work. Being neurotypical means your brain developed and works like the brains of most people.

Hmm, again. That quote is from a respected U.S. medical source, Cleveland Clinic.

So, neurotypical has to do with having a brain that “developed and works like the brains of most people”. Well, okay, presumably while still respecting the fact that “no two brains can ever develop and work exactly the same”?

The above statements suggest to me that the bell curve of neuro-whatever is very, very broad and flat, and covers one hell of a range. Which presumably makes it somewhat difficult to adjudicate what constitutes the majority of people in this respect and, therefore, what ‘normal’ is?

Indeed, investigating further, Cleveland Clinic explains that ….

Because each brain is unique, that means there’s no such thing as “normal.” Instead, the approach becomes about looking for patterns in how brains work. Neurotypical is just the term for having a brain that develops and works like most humans’ brains.

Hmm, for yet a third time.

So, if we go along with these explanations, we have learned that “brains are infinitely complex and no two brains can ever develop and work exactly the same” and, in fact, “there’s no such thing as ‘normal’”.

But, if there’s no such thing as ‘normal’, must not that actually become, by default, the New Normal?

It strikes me that perhaps the only reliable conclusion must be, as the old saying has it … “All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer.”³

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So, let’s try to sum this up a bit.

We’ve got all these brains being taken to workplaces or, perhaps more likely these days, sitting behind work-screens at home. As established above, each and every one is different (the brains, that is) but of one thing we can presumably be sure … every single one of them will have concerns.

These concerns will likely cover a range of issues, personal, work-related and general-life-related, many of which will be minor but a few of which may well be really concerning.

And a really concerning issue may well be or become a stressor. Aha, stressors, causes of stress! Well, yes, but, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb has pointed out, stressors actually are information.

Now the crux of complex systems, those with interacting parts, is that they convey information to these component parts through stressors, or thanks to these stressors: your body gets information about the environment not through your logical apparatus, your intelligence and ability to reason, compute, and calculate, but through stress, via hormones or other messengers we haven’t discovered yet.⁴

This figures as part of Taleb’s great insight into what he termed Antifragile.

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile.⁵

Now, I’m assuming that, ideally, we’d all like to more smoothly and calmly suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and certainly avoid getting into a state where we actively wish to shuffle off the mortal coil. But it’s the bumps in life’s road that are potentially helpful in this regard. Taleb also makes the point that …

… an environment with variability (hence randomness) does not expose us to chronic stress injury, unlike human-designed systems. … Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.⁶

Two factors, I suggest, mean that we far too often tackle this issue precisely the wrong way round.

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The two factors are:

One: we actively increase the amount of chronic stress in situations.

Two: we then effectively valorize the wrong element! Which, in this instance, is to say that we make it more worthwhile than not to be a victim.

I know, I know, I’m deliberately being somewhat obtuse. But isn’t it at least a little concerning that we seem to have created a world - a Western world anyway - where the prize points are awarded to those who claim to suffer and where, by contrast, there is the sense that to be ‘normal’ is to be somehow inferior?

Why?

A big part of it is surely that it is a group thing, and one that can bring real benefits. There may well be plausible reasons to offload some personal responsibility and opt for a bit of victimhood … all in a supposed good cause, of course!

Here’s a simple example …

When I Google “do you get extra time in exams for …”⁷ a whole list of choices comes up unbidden. I am immediately invited to check whether or not I can get extra time if I suffer from any of the following:
… ADHD, anxiety, autism, depression, dyscalculia, dyslexia, dyspraxia, epilepsy, hyperhidrosis (excessive sweating, since you ask), OCD, slow writing …

The answer in every one of these instances is ‘Yes’, up to 25 per cent additional time may be allowed if any of these conditions is ‘officially acknowledged’. And I suspect there are umpteen more afflictions that are similarly rewarded.

If you genuinely have one of these conditions the added time may be entirely appropriate. But what if you don’t and you pretend to have something? My point is that there appear to be no downsides to such simulation … so some people, I suspect, would say “Why not? There’s no harm done.” And once such behavior starts it all too easily grows, like the proverbial snowball rolling downhill.

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So, to sum up, what’s going on here?

Humans are susceptible to coming together around numerous prompts in the environment … even when those prompts may ostensibly be negative.

That is surely not contentious? Numerous incidents throughout history have demonstrated it, and the greater the number of people involved, the more likely that less-than-wholesome group-think may arise.

Here’s Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) in the Appendix to his book, The Devils of Loudun, which is about just such an occurrence:

‘Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.’ In the midst of two or three hundred, the divine presence becomes more problematical. And when the numbers run into thousands, or tens of thousands, the likelihood of God being there, in the consciousness of each individual, declines almost to the vanishing point. For such is the nature of an excited crowd (and every crowd is automatically self-exciting) that, where two or three thousand are gathered together, there is an absence not merely of deity, but even of common humanity.⁸

Huxley, of course, never knew the internet - and didn’t predict anything quite like it in his most famous dystopia set out in Brave New World. So he didn’t know what was in the offing a few decades ahead.

But isn’t it true that the internet and social media actually enable the crowd-forming function that he refers to? It’s just that the individuals do not actually have to get together in person.

Huxley goes on …

The fact of being one of a multitude delivers a man from his consciousness of being an insulated self and carries him down into a less than personal realm, where there are no responsibilities, no right or wrong, no need for thought or judgment or discrimination - only a strong vague sense of togetherness, only a shared excitement, a collective alienation.

So, isn’t it perhaps likely that a large and growing number of people are unthinkingly buying in to a Wellness philosophy that now goes way beyond the promulgation of common sense?

It may all have begun with sensible advice – get some exercise, don’t drink too much, give up smoking – but has now metastasized into an all-consuming philosophy that treats the human condition as an optimization problem waiting to be solved.

Come to think of it, isn’t the data-driven approach to human flourishing analogous with the managerial mindset that has given us an ever-increasing roster of performance reviews and KPIs? After all, if you can't measure it, how do you know if your Wellness Initiative is delivering ROI?

So, has workplace Wellness become another mechanism for extracting productivity from employees? What an insidious thought! But the message can surely be interpreted that way: if we provide you with standing desks (because, as you know, sitting really is the new smoking), meditation pods (because thinking really is quite stressful, isn’t it?), and Wellness coordinators (“Chief Happiness Officers” perhaps?) we will get more out of you, won’t we?

If this is anywhere near true, it would mean, of course, that the promised land of "work-life balance" has instead delivered "work-life integration," which sounds progressive until you realize it means work never ends. Has the boundary between personal and professional been dissolved in the name of holistic health? If so, it might help explain why mental health is such a prominent topic these days.

And, ironically, of course, it means that we all can buy-in to the notion that all of us are fragile (forgetting that implies we become less and less antifragile), that our concerns are really concerning … and that we all are prey to anxiety, depression and the growing panoply of mental challenges that neurodiversity now makes available. It has a huge amount going for it - most of all it can accommodate us all in a really quite comfy place where the sense of belonging will be positively palpable.

That’s achieved by employers positing it all as a value element of their overall employee value proposition. Something along these lines: “Right now, we are all having to confront an unprecedented array of mental pressures, particularly at work. Here at XYZ Company you can relax because we understand the challenges and provide resources to help mitigate them. This really is a workplace where you can feel you belong and are valued.”

To top it all, for each of us as individuals, even if we exaggerate when it comes to leaning on our OCD, or whatever, according to one commentator, we won’t really be exaggerating at all!

To dissimulate is to pretend not to to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending: “Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms” (Littré). Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the “true” and the “false”, the “real” and the “imaginary”. ⁹

In fact, Jean Baudrillard, the author of the above (shown in translation from the original French), has a lot to say on this topic that has a very real resonance with what technology is now enabling for all of us. But to do justice to that I’ll make the simulacrum the topic of a future post.

Thanks for reading.

1. Peter Drucker. Management Challenges for the 21st Century (1999)

2. Arthur Miller. Death of a Salesman ‘Requiem’ (1949)

3. Attributed to Robert Owen (1771-1858)

4. Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Antifragile (2012)

5. Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Ibid.

6. Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Ibid.

7. Online search 04 August 2025.

8. Aldous Huxley. The Devils of Loudon (1952)

9. Jean Baudrillard. Simulacres et Simulation (1981). Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser (copyright © by The University of Michigan (1994)