The Emergent Smart Organisation with Emotional Potentials as Source of Creativity and Collaborative Intelligence in Responsible Companies: Well-being, Participation, Resilience and Spirituality over Competences for Possible Happiness

Abstract

In the future society of knowledge (practices and digital worlds) the fundamental strategic factor is the quality of human capital and the relationships that shape it in a coordinated manner for the well-being of people and organisations, not just the availability of raw materials or advanced technologies as IT or cloud computing. Levers of well-being that represent factors for the integrated enhancement of the interconnections between human capital, social capital and semantic capital. Useful to forge the concrete transition from techno-centric approaches (for rigidity, heaviness and control) to anthropocentric approaches (for lightness, flexibility and self-organisation) towards eco-resilient, motivating and enabling organisations that have at their core the valorisation of emotions, feelings and passions and therefore of people between skills and competences accompanied by spirituality. “Emotional organisational” forms, therefore, insofar as they are engaging and participatory, and constructive of a new Humanism of Work and Enterprise to achieve a shared sense of our inexhaustible learning to learn in order to prosper together with the Other, who is within us and outside too. In the knowledge that within every worker, manager or entrepreneur—as well as in every user—we always find a person attracted by the sense of the limits in our species as living beings, hungry for reflective knowledge of the Other to explore their relentless overcoming between emotions and empathy in search of meaning in some shared happiness. The debate on the crisis of the welfare state and on the relaunch of a second-level (or proximity) welfare as a “complementary” to that delivered to us by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which is increasingly fragile and costly in all industrialised countries due to debt sustainability, social changes (family, work, life expectancy, mobility, education, gender gap, migration), technological change and transformation of the relationship with nature (cloning, induced fertility, biotech, neuroscience, etc.), is therefore fundamental.

Structural response to the endemic planetary phenomenon of job dissatisfaction that leads 70–80% of people in workplaces to demotivation (Gallup, USA, 2020) and thus to work poorly or uninterestedly or in depressive forms. Destroying—in this way—sense that will then be transferred also in private life in a vicious circle of relational fragility and malaise and with subtractive effects of creativity and intelligence. The aim of this contribution is, therefore, to try to shed light on organisational and business evolution which, as we shall see, puts the person back at the centre of the processes, in particular, by looking at the relationship between organisations, digitalisation and emotions, to reunite what Fordism had separated and the twentieth century consolidated (also by super-ordinating technology to Man and underestimating the relationship with nature, the environment and the community): machines and man, intellectual and manual, mind body and conscience, intelligence and operativity, decision and action, individual and community, abstract and concrete. This is a transformative trajectory in search of a “well-being without adjectives” that cannot be accompanied by the simple growth of income or luxury consumption, which dynamic organisations can help to support by enhancing the emotional factors and the multiple human and group intelligences, exploring their potential and constructively offering responsibility and collaboration in the awareness between mindfulness and sensemaking, “beyond” control and hierarchy in order to restore productivity (depressed for over 30 years)—and in particular cognitive one—stable positive performance and creative innovation. A transformation that is now necessary in organisations in order to rebuild a sense of corporate belonging as a common good that requires “strong” forms of direct and indirect participation in the generation of value for new forms of creativity at the service of employeeship (“beyond” leadership) for a shared growth of a company as an “ecology of prosperity” for a new “human flowering” in the smart organisation exploring talent in everyone in an emergent composition between competences, virtues and spirituality.