I personally have found it pretty situational – I went through a fairly binary switch from “had not had a project that felt important enough to take heroic responsibility on” to “suddenly found lots of projects where it felt fairly natural take heroic responsibility for things.”
(And then burned out and currently don’t take much buck-stops-here responsibility, but feel like I could again if I needed to. I think figuring out how to do this sustainably, both as an individual and at the org level, is pretty tricky)
Do you think there are certain situations one could force or reenact in order for a person to develop the trait of taking responsibility, or discover if they have it? Do you feel like the perceived importance of the project is the only factor, or are their other factors that can induce this?
For me, it was quite important that the project was not just “important” in the sense that it was relevant to the global good, but “important” in the sense that it was meeting all of my own needs. ie:
I felt like other people in my social circle cared about it
The end product was something that tied in with my overall self-narrative/image
Many intermediate stages were very creatively stimulating
The difficulty of the tasks were roughly at my current skill level
There was clearly nobody else who would do the thing if I didn’t do it (this is unfortunately in tension with “doing it sustainably”. It’s possible people need to be forced to learn this skill in somewhat stressful burnout-inducing environments and then later can apply it in healthier environments)
A lot of things had to go right at once, which were pretty situation-dependent (and me-dependent)
For what it’s worth, when I started teaching and was responsible for 30 children, I suddenly became a lot better at taking responsibility / noticing things that need doing / optimizing systems. That’s a situation that I think forces people to take on the “heroic responsibility” mindset.
I personally have found it pretty situational – I went through a fairly binary switch from “had not had a project that felt important enough to take heroic responsibility on” to “suddenly found lots of projects where it felt fairly natural take heroic responsibility for things.”
(And then burned out and currently don’t take much buck-stops-here responsibility, but feel like I could again if I needed to. I think figuring out how to do this sustainably, both as an individual and at the org level, is pretty tricky)
Do you think there are certain situations one could force or reenact in order for a person to develop the trait of taking responsibility, or discover if they have it? Do you feel like the perceived importance of the project is the only factor, or are their other factors that can induce this?
For me, it was quite important that the project was not just “important” in the sense that it was relevant to the global good, but “important” in the sense that it was meeting all of my own needs. ie:
I felt like other people in my social circle cared about it
The end product was something that tied in with my overall self-narrative/image
Many intermediate stages were very creatively stimulating
The difficulty of the tasks were roughly at my current skill level
There was clearly nobody else who would do the thing if I didn’t do it (this is unfortunately in tension with “doing it sustainably”. It’s possible people need to be forced to learn this skill in somewhat stressful burnout-inducing environments and then later can apply it in healthier environments)
A lot of things had to go right at once, which were pretty situation-dependent (and me-dependent)
For what it’s worth, when I started teaching and was responsible for 30 children, I suddenly became a lot better at taking responsibility / noticing things that need doing / optimizing systems. That’s a situation that I think forces people to take on the “heroic responsibility” mindset.