Delight: The Ultimate Stakeholder Value
The Nature of Delight
What is delight? What causes delight? Can delight be assessed and quantified?
According to Vedic wisdom, delight is what one feels when one is not actively seeking anything. It is the restful state of contentedness that one momentarily feels just after obtaining a desired object, but before the next seeking arises. Delight is our natural state. When we forget our true infinite nature and imagine we don't have something and seek after it, we fall from our natural state of delight. In other words, delight is a state of perception of one’s self-completeness and absence of limitation. Seeking arises due to perception of limitation.
The Centrality of Delight
According to Vedic wisdom, delight / Ananda is the parama-purushaartha (ultimate seeking) of all existence. The four purusharthas, namely, dharma / universal harmony, artha / possession of resources, kaama / seeking experience and moksha / liberation for limitation, are merely four means to delight that we are actually after.
This is indeed our common experience. Observing any universal value manifest gives us joy, and its violation is revolting. That's why we enjoy the triumph of hero in movies. Possession of things gives joy as it gives a (false) sense of completeness. Fulfilment of a desired experience gives momentary joy. Lastly, overcoming a limitation gives joy.
Hence giving delight is the most foolproof strategy to influence people as it touches the core of their being.
Grades of Delight
So in normal life experience, what are the levels of my experience of delight? We can classify them into four grades of increasing intensity of delight:- 0. I am dead, unable to survive independently.
- 1. I am alive, exist and survive as distinct from others comfortably.
- 2. I am useful, recognized and valued: My existence is recognized and valued by others.
- 3. I am unique: I stand out and excel at something. I am powerful and impactful.
- 4. I am growing: I expand by overcoming a limitation and achieving or acquiring something I couldn't before.
These grades are different from the four purusharthas or four objects of seeking and givers of delight.
Happiness Quotient
Based on these grades of delight, one can define an organism's happiness quotient as the difference between desired grade of delight and actual currently experienced grade of delight.
Happiness quotient(kosha) = 10^actual - 10^desired grade of delight at a kosha.
If happiness quotient is negative, it indicates distress.
Here are some examples of distress:
- Unable to grow / expand
- Unable to excel / stand out
- Unvalued or unrecognized
- Unable to survive
in increasing order of intensity of distress. Whatever an organism, i.e., an individual or team, experiences as delight or distress falls under one of these 5 grades. All actions can be evaluated based on how they affect an organism's delight experience. Effective motivation strategies are ways to reduce an organism's distress or enhance delight. Organisational decision-making must necessarily consider the effect of actions on the delight of stakeholders. The surest way to motivate an organism to act is to show it a path to delight through the action.
Experiencer of Delight
In the description above, we have been referring to ‘I’ as the experiencer of delight, the entity that strives for delight. This experiencer is not one but multiple personalities of the organism represented by pancha koshas (actually 7 realms of being called sapta lokas). Each kosha has its own notion of ‘I’ that experiences delight in various grades outlined above. So one can visualize an organism's delight experience as a 5x5 matrix.
Normally, only the lower two koshas are active and demand attention. The higher koshas are well withìn range of experience but dormant and drowned out by the clamor of the lower two.
The table below depicts various example individual personalities and organizations with their dominant identity and the lowest grade of delight it aspires for. A particular individual may have different levels of aspiration for delight at different koshas. For example, I might be satisfied with just a healthy physique (grade 1 at annamaya kosha 1) but desire to be an innovator (grade 3 at buddhi kosha 4).
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