23. Virtual Pilgrimage, Real Pain

“What’s next?” asked my friends and family after I returned. Their faces once showed confusion when I first told them about the iguanas and all of that, but now, they couldn’t wait to hear what even crazier new adventure I had in store.

“I don’t know”, I replied. It was a small white lie because my plan was to regain the 10 kg I had lost from the walk and figure out what I had learnt from the pilgrimage. Sharing that would have deflated their excitement.

Returning to my day job, I felt an increased unease hovering around the edges of my approach to work. I felt that there were other, arguably more useful ways, to approach the way we design, deliver and measure what we consider to be a good place to work.

I suspected that keeping track of how many people use or don’t use an office, or how satisfied employees are with their facilities, or the amount of energy the building consumes, and the many other things we typically measure were all necessary, but insufficient to satisfy even the dimmest version of what the Signposts point us toward.

In search of new metrics, I found a Workplace Dignity Scale [45] and in collaboration with a multi-disciplinary team of design practitioners and academics set out to explore if workplace design could help employees maintain and gain dignity.

We published our preliminary findings in a short report entitled Designing for Dignity [46]. A point worth mentioning here is that dignity is affirmed when people are treated as inherently worthy of respect, and that can be crystallised passively, yet pervasively, in the place they work.

Our Designing for Dignity study was essentially an exploratory way of looking at the workplace. It has a long way to go to earn its place alongside established methods. But even if it never gets there, it still serves as a reminder of what counts in the workplace. As the sociologist William B. Cameron wrote: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted” [47].

This presents an often-overlooked signpost:

Slowly, my iguana – the promised epiphanies from my pilgrimage – started to take shape. On that front the going was slow, but I was making great progress on my other project. The kilos were piling a lot faster than the lessons. Eating chicken parmigiana with a sense of duty makes it taste even better.

And then, 2020 came around.

Little did I know that my pilgrimage would resume two years after I walked to Sydney. This time it wasn’t prompted by iguanas, nor by any other animal, but by our lives becoming increasingly more digital in response to the developing COVID-19 pandemic.

“Can a pilgrimage be done virtually?”, I wondered.

It was a question I was glad I never had to think about, but an advertisement promoting an online version of El Camino de Santiago led me to ponder it. I clicked on the comments section beneath the post expecting to find an overwhelming consensus that the only way to do El Camino was at El Camino, in Spain – not via a website. It was quite the opposite and an overwhelming number of comments appeared in support:

Cool!

I love this!

I just finished The Camino [online] and am thinking about doing The Inca trail [online] next.

I kept scrolling. Surely, I’d find some comments from people who ‘really knew’ what they were talking about. Eventually, a long way down, I found one:

Fascinating how a path to ‘god’ or ‘oneness’ or at least the human quest for meaning, gets boiled down to something so trivial.

The trivial part referred to how one does El Camino online: you walk anywhere you find yourself to be in the real world and upload the distance walked onto a website where an icon of yourself moves along the French route connecting the French Pyrenees to Santiago De Compostela in Spain.

Simple, and trivial.

Normally, I’m not this cynical, but this ‘pilgrimage’ was irritating me. On reflection, I realised what was bothering me; this pilgrimage wasn’t done the way a pilgrimage is meant to be done and consequently, it changed what a pilgrimage is, or ought to be. The virtual Camino challenged underpinning notions about pilgrimages.

With such a realisation, so too came that my iguana was doing a similar thing, not to pilgrimages, but to workplaces. Ultimately, my evolved idea challenges underlying notions of the workplace.

In one of those moments, which I knew I would come to regret later, it came to me that I owed it to my iguana to overcome the distaste created by something that challenged my beliefs. I needed to give the virtual Camino de Santiago a fair go.

To be clear, I’m not advocating the unrestrained adoption of ideas which we might have good reasons to avoid. Rather, my suggestion is to reconsider those which we discard for no other reason than that they question our beliefs. I would say that a way to differentiate between these two is to examine the extent of the visceral reaction one has to the idea.

Of course, equally wrong can be accepting an idea just because it fits comfortably with one’s view of the world. I amazed myself by how well I had managed to illustrate both sides of my bias by discrediting opposing views to mine about pilgrimages while seeking out those that aligned with my own.

Surprisingly, the online version of El Camino came pre-loaded with a very important feature of pilgrimages that I raised in Part 1: pain. While not physical, it was one of the greatest pains to human nature which Walter Bagehot warned us about in the nineteenth century, the pain of a new idea.

[A new idea] makes you think that after all, your favourite notions may be wrong, your firmest beliefs ill-founded. [48]

The first signpost of the virtual pilgrimage appeared even before I paid for my registration:

Back when I wrote my PhD thesis, I argued that the future of the workplace would be influenced by the process through which we adopt innovation. It’s a bit of an underwhelming statement. However, adoption of innovation is far from being a rational straight forward process. Personal, corporate, and even industry biases within wider social and cultural contexts moderate the adoption of innovation [49]. Importantly, these biases are not mere inconveniences, they are extremely useful in helping us understand who we are and the type of futures we aspire to.

My Camino was virtual, but the 774 km required to complete it were all too real. I found myself once again walking an unnecessary number of kilometres for another ridiculous reason. On the upside, this virtual experiment offered the opportunity to experience a challenging idea – an important and necessary step in reshaping the future of work and the workplace. It also created a fertile context to contrast analogue with virtual worlds in ways that are particularly useful to work environments.