Mottainai — the regret of waste (Word at Work Series)

Good ideas often start with a single word. This is here's an idea worth playing with with myself, Lambert, from Cultivated. Each episode, one word, its origin, its journey, and what it still means for the way we work today. Good morning. Today's word is motonae.

Now motonae is a Japanese phrase that broadly translates as the regret of waste or more commonly we might refer to this as waste not, want not. It is about regretting wasting, usually natural resources, but also to avoid that regret in the first place. So to think through carefully before we use it. Now, as I said, it's typically associated to natural resources, the kind of things that we would naturally associate with the environment, with our nature that we live in. But I actually think this is a helpful construct for the world of work.

You see, we all have human resources, not the HR team, but our own individual human resources, those finite resources of time, energy, and attention. The resources that once they are spent, we are never getting them back. Unlike money, which we can generate more of if we're good at what we do, we will never reclaim or regenerate time, energy, and attention once it's been spent. That is life happening, passing by. And it's my observation that many organizations are squandering using our finite human resources ineffectively through duplicate work, confusion, chaos, politics, creeping bureaucracy, pointless meetings.

And I think many people realize that their finite resources of time, energy, and attention are not always being used to their maximum. They're not releasing their human potential. And I think Mottainai is a wonderful way to look at this, not only when it does happen, which it will do in an organization, when we're confused, we're misaligned, the actions going in different directions, there should be a sense of regret. But more importantly, maybe a little bit of consideration and thought upfront before we waste that human natural resources. This isn't an argument for lots of upfront planning and, you know, thinking through every scenario before we move into action.

That is MottainaiA in action in many respects too. But that careful consideration, clarity over what it is we're expecting to achieve, alignment across teams and departments in the organization so that we're not doing duplicate work, we're not misaligned, we don't have action spreading in multiple directions. And once we have clarity, once we're all aligned around it, then that gives us the conditions for momentum to emerge. It should not be at odds to achieve business results, to be efficient and effective for what we do whilst using our time, energy, and attention on the right things. Mottainai is a wonderful concept to think about when we're in our workplaces.

When we do squander time, energy, and attention on the wrong things and duplicate work on the chaos and confusion that can sometimes happen, there should be a sense of regret. What can we do differently? Let's not repeat that again on the next project or the next piece of work. And then when things do start to go wrong, which inevitably they will, we have the bravery and the courage to stop or intervene in the right places to avoid even more of our finite human resources being squandered on the wrong things in the wrong direction. Wattenai is a wonderful concept.

And when we apply it to our natural resources that makes sense, we should regret when we waste something and think carefully whether we actually need it in the first place. And I think the same concept works in business.