Our Origin Story

If you look up the meaning of an origin story, you’ll find it is your established background narrative, that informs your identity and motivations. In the entertainment world it is used to show why characters became protagonists or antagonists, and in comics how they gained their superpowers. Origin stories are rarely created in the moment -it is only by having a sense of what we have become that one can trace the paths that led us there. Perhaps, too, origin stories evolve in the telling as we gain greater insight and self-awareness; as what we have become evolves and requires more reflection and explanation.

The Mindful Business Charter celebrated its fifth anniversary in October 2023. Our origin story has existed and evolved in the minds, words and (perhaps most importantly) actions of those involved. It feels like now is a good time to try to articulate it, to mark a point in time and to help us explain ourselves to the wider world.

The first discussions began in 2017 in the UK. At that time there had already been a lot of great work done around raising awareness of mental health, reducing the stigma that surrounds it and investing in supports for those in distress. The legal sector, coming to terms with the growing crisis of mental illness within the profession, was playing a key role.

In that context a group of six senior figures (we will call them the originators) from the London offices of Barclays, Pinsent Masons and Addleshaw Goddard began to talk. Whether from their own experience or that of colleagues, the originators all had some insight into mental distress, but they were lawyers, not psychologists, and their thinking was grounded in the practical reality of their working lives. As such they had well in mind the particular challenges and pressures of working in the legal profession, as well as the importance of a healthy profession to wider society. A crisis of mental health among lawyers risked impacting not just the individual members of the profession but also the crucial role lawyers play in so many aspects of business and wider public life.

The originators started from a recognition that existing efforts focussed upon dealing with the symptoms, as opposed to the cause. As Nelson Mandela observed, rather than simply pulling people out of the river downstream, why don’t we go up stream and stop them falling in in the first place. They identified that stress lies at the heart of the issue, and it is well established that stress is both a leading cause of physical and mental illness and also negatively impacts cognitive functioning and therefore the quality and efficiency of work product.

Stress comes from many places, and some is inevitable, but some is not, and comes from the ways we work individually and collectively. If we could identify the unnecessary sources of stress in the ways in which we work, then we ought to be able to remove them and work both more healthily and more effectively. There were two ways in particular in which they dared to dream big:

· Although individual lawyers, teams and firms could try to make a difference in their own working practices, if this could become a profession wide endeavour then one could really begin to imagine a meaningful and sustainable momentum for positive change, the profession coming together as a whole to solve the common problems it faces; and

· Very often part of the cause, and a barrier for making change, is the nature of the client to supplier dynamic, the assumptions professional suppliers make about what clients expect and what excellent client service demands. In this context Barclays recognised a critical role they could play in giving the law firms they work with the permission and the language to talk about how they could work together more effectively and healthily.

As a result, the idea of the Charter was born as a means to identify and remove those unnecessary sources of stress. Most of us are kind, we do not mean to cause each other stress, but we do, and then we don’t talk about it. What if we all tried to be more aware of the impact of our behaviours upon ourselves and those around us, and gave each other the permission to talk about it? That way, we could help each other to identify those unnecessary sources of stress and remove them, to work more healthily and more effectively.

Being lawyers, the natural instinct was to create a detailed and prescriptive rulebook, but the originators quickly realised that approach would not work. As a result, they decided upon the idea of a permissive framework, a common language and a set of ideas to think about and with which to challenge established ways of thinking and behaving. Inevitably there was resistance and scepticism. Lawyers are a conservative bunch who don’t like change. It was that daring to challenge, the gentle “what if?” and the call to focus not on what we can’t do or cannot change, but rather on what we can do and can change, that were the inspiration.

They gathered a group of senior and junior lawyers both from private practice firms and in house teams. They brainstormed their sources of stress and then assessed them by reference to impact and solvability. Through workshops the themes were grouped and became the pillars of the Charter as we know it today and the bullet point guidance under each of them.

The Charter was launched in a room in the Law Society on Chancery Lane in London on World Mental Health Day, 10 October, 2018. Gathered were representatives of three banks and nine law firms who formally signed the Charter as a commitment to each other. Press releases were made, and word spread. It was soon clear that there was wider support for the initiative.

An early incident demonstrated in a small but powerful way the potential of the Charter and the possibility for change. On New Year’s Eve 2018, one of the legal team at Barclays sent out a request to one of their panel law firms asking for input on something that day. Ordinarily, the response would be along the lines of “Yes of course, you are Barclays and you are hugely important to us as a law firm and you can have anything you like”. The partner at the law firm concerned, however, had heard about the Charter and decided to test it. He emailed back to the contact at Barclays to say “If you need this response today then of course we will do that. You are, after all, Barclays and a hugely important client. It is, however, New Year’s Eve and my team would rather be with their families and friends. Do you actually need the response today?” The reply from Barclays was along the lines of “Gosh, sorry, yes of course this can wait, next week is absolutely fine.”

The permission that Barclays had given by signing the Charter and so publicly attaching their name to it, allowed the law firm partner to be brave. Without that permission there is no way he would have felt able to push back in that way. That is the essence of the Charter.

it was recognised that the movement would need executive support to realise its potential and this was engaged. When brainstorming the ambition for the movement, one of the key themes to emerge was to create a legal profession we could encourage our children to join.

One of the organisational commitments in the Charter is to introduce a new member each year and so it was that our numbers grew. Before long we had a community of over 100 organisations from an ever-widening number of countries around the world. We recognised early on that although the roots of the Charter lay in the legal profession, the issues it sought to address and the solutions it proposed went far wider and the original wording was adjusted to be more inclusive of a wider business community.

It is that sense of a community of likeminded businesses looking to collaborate with each other in a shared common purpose that has underpinned our first five years and will be at our core for the future. We can learn from, support and inspire each other. That sense of common endeavour will continue to provide the energy and imagination to pursue our purpose.

That is perhaps our superpower.

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