Bridging the languages of science and spirituality

By Madushka Balasuriya

NASA, rock stars, business leaders and churches. Four very different social groups, with four very different outlooks, yet they all agree on one thing: Dr. Dragos Bratasanu is on to something.

At 31 years of age, the glowing endorsements this Romanian award-winning scientist, filmmaker and motivational speaker is receiving would be the envy of most anyone. 

For the Sri Lanka Institute of Training and Development (SLITAD) to have him address their annual National Conference this week (9 and 10 June), the most anticipated event in the Institute’s annual calendar and one which attracts a large number of high profile organisations, is therefore a relative coup.

Dr. Dragos, who is an official consultant for NASA’s Leadership, Human Factors and Social Risk Management Program, has spoken on leadership worldwide in five continents. He is the author of ‘Engineering Success’ which describes how NASA builds leaders and teams. He also directed the movie ‘Amazing You’, a breath-taking journey to personal fulfilment with NASA’s top leaders and other international personalities.

He is also not what you would expect, dressed head to toe in black, with a black ear stud to match. “If you tell me I’m an idiot or if you tell me I’m the smartest guy in the world it makes no difference because what I am is still the same,” says the man who has been named “among the smartest people in the world” by Forbes Magazine.

“If you understand who you are, you don’t have to defend it. What you have to defend is your awareness of that. Can you actually say that someone is better because they live in Silicon Valley as opposed to someone who lives on a mountain in Nepal?

“At the human level everyone is the same. We just live in different contexts.”

This humble outlook Dragos shares is one that has been developed over several years, observing NASA and the way their teams and leaders interact on a daily basis. The one overwhelming aspect he has taken away from his experience is ‘context’. To him, context is the driving force behind everything we do.

“We adapt to the environment. Social context is what drives our thinking, drives our success. Because we always adapt to the context. That’s why leadership is so fundamentally important, because you drive the context.”

Humble beginnings

To help me understand how he came to this conclusion, he relates a story, something he loves to do (“People learn best from stories and from examples”). He tells me how, having grown up in communist Romania, his parents had pushed him to study engineering as it was the “safest way into life”. At university he was living on $ 100 a month, and ended up doing a lot of reading “about us as human beings and who we are in the world”. 

He noticed that all the books on leadership essentially said the same thing: if you have a dream you can make it happen. “If what the books are saying is true, then maybe I can do something about it. Even if I’m living in a dormitory barely making my meals. Can I think my way into my dreams?” he wondered.

So the self-professed “terrible student who hated college and engineering” began applying what he was learning. Soon he had organised expeditions to the North and South Poles, which earned him a PHD in Germany in Satellite Image Intelligence.

“I told you I hated engineering. However I loved doing image processing and the satellite industry, a field which I received many awards in. Finally I realised it’s not really about the technical skills as much as it is about the stories you tell yourself, about who you are and what you can do.”

Then he had another thought. “If I can accomplish this, really from almost nothing, what else can I do?”

And so his dreams began to grow. He decided he wanted to go to NASA and learn from them. He worked towards earning scholarships to go there, and he did. But eventually after numerous successes and failures a nagging thought kept swirling in his head. “How can I tell the difference between the projects that fail and the ones that succeed, from the very beginning? Why do I have to work for half a year and then fail?”

“What can I share?”

In the search for an answer he spent time with some of the best minds, not only from NASA, but other walks of life as well, such as rock stars and even the founders of Angry Birds, Rovio. He saw that all their insight pointed to one direction.

“Everything comes down to having the courage to live your truth. This means embracing what you most want. Accepting beyond any social judgements what you really want to do in the world. Accepting what you want to contribute in this world. And then starting with the question, ‘what can I share?’

“Mainstream thinking is about, ‘what can I get from people?’ How can I get a better job? How can I get more money? And I realised that for all the projects that I did, I never asked what I could get. When you come from this point of ‘what can I share?’ It’s obvious that the world will give you back the same thing.”

If it sounds simple, that is because it is. However the more Dragos looked into recreating this simple outlook, the more he found there was something holding him back.

“There are many invisible social forces driving our thinking,” he explained. “You should always ask yourself if you’re making a decision whether it’s because something you really believe in or are you just adapting to the environment.”

Science and spirituality

This was when the idea of bridging science and spirituality was borne. “I think spirituality fundamentally boils down to understanding who we are in this world. Understanding that who we are is different from what we know, and who we are is way different from what we do and accomplish.”

To illustrate his point, Dragos points to the suicide rate among university students in the United States, which is about eight per 100,000 students. Tying down your value to your accomplishments, he says, is a dangerous practice. 

“That’s a dangerous way of thinking. If you get a job when you’re 25, were you worthless until that point? Will you become worthless when you retire? If you fail, you can always get more information, more knowledge, read another book, whatever. But you have to put distance between who you are and what you accomplish, because if this thing here fails, you can then drop down to a sense of security knowing that no matter what happens you are perfect just the way you are.”

Dragos though acknowledges that external pressures sometimes get in the way of an individual being able to objectively deal with a situation, problem or task.

“Technology is supposed to work always. But in some disasters, if you go a step back and ask the question, ‘why did technology fail?’ In almost all cases you see that it is an issue with the social environment and the human factors.

“That’s not to say it is about the individuals either. Individuals, they have technical skills, but the social factor becomes your blindspot.”

Addressing key human needs

These social factors, he adds, are the combination of all human behaviours within an environment, with the behaviours driven by four key human needs: the need to be valued, the need to feel included, the need to have a sense of purpose in this world, and the need to have a sense of certainty.

To make someone feel valued, Dragos says it is essential that they feel appreciated. Not just as a token sentiment, but authentically and habitually. 

“If you authentically appreciate somebody they will not be afraid of telling you bad news or giving you information. And if you have the proper information then you can actually mitigate any problem.

“In most cases failures happen because somebody had a piece of information that they didn’t have the courage to share.” 

Another major flaw in the make-up of most workplace systems and teams is that sometimes people do not complete tasks on time. While Dragos says this can be overlooked on occasion, he warns that in most cases it is a recipe for disaster.

“It starts with really simple things but continues on to the big issues. People think that ‘I can be late for a meeting’ or ‘this doesn’t matter so much because it’s so small’. If I cannot trust you with a small thing how can I trust you with a big budget? If people keep all agreements then everybody is doing what they say, when they say.”

One of the most difficult things for human beings to do, Dragos has observed, is to come to a crystallised view of the purpose and state of their task. He says it is crucial people embrace reality without judgement.

“Telling the truth and embracing reality without any judgement is very difficult for most of us to do. Can we come together as a team and agree on what’s the reality? What’s the reality in our marriage, what’s the reality in our company?

“The problem is when you start defining a reality, the second unconscious step which usually stops us from doing that, is we judge the reality. 

“If you lie about the problems then how can you solve them?”

The final step, he says, in conquering social context or environment is to address the need for certainty. This is done by an individual accepting total accountability for their actions.

“If you’re working alone, be a hundred per cent accountable for the result. There’s no blaming, no complaining. If there is a team, sit down and agree on who is accountable for what. It’s easy to blame governments, it’s easy to blame bosses, but it always comes down to you as an individual. Are you 100% accountable for your own life?

“There’s also a major difference between accountability and responsibility. You can know you’re responsible for something that failed and it doesn’t matter, but accountability takes you a step forward where you’re accountable for the final result. So you will not stop until you make it to the very end.”

If one of these needs are not met the whole system can come crashing down. It is crucial that problems are addressed early on.

“The opposite of accountability is blaming and complaining. Obviously if you blame somebody they don’t feel appreciated, then if they don’t feel appreciated their agreements drop.”

Cultural differences

The more he explains it, the clearer it becomes how passionate he is about this system. He draws a quadrant with each human need taking up a square, enthusiastically adding: “In any relationship you can apply these four dimensions to see if it’s working or not.”

When I question him about how he tailors his message to different cultural sensitivities, he takes a hard-line stance. He says the four fundamental human needs transcend all cultures. 

“All of us want to feel valued. It comes down again to being 100% accountable and not using the culture as an excuse to not make a change.” 

“If something doesn’t work why stick with it? This is a story we tell ourselves: ‘we are from Asia and we have this sort of culture.’ That exact thing also applies in Europe,” he adds before diving into another example. This time of airline co-pilots from Europe, America and Asia, whose fear of informing the pilots of their decisions had led to terrible disasters.

“The idea of cultures shouldn’t be used as an excuse for failure. If you address the human needs, then the social context will change and drive success.”

As our conversation comes to a close, it is clear that despite his undoubted jet lag he could go on speaking for several more hours. Fittingly he concludes by offering one final piece of wisdom that most certainly transcends cultures.

“One of my mentors used to say: ‘The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. And if you don’t know what the main thing is, make it the main thing to find out what the main thing is. Because the main thing is the driver of all your decisions.”