The Times In Which We Live

by Tom Heuerman, Ph.D. with Diane Olson, Ph.D.

Humankind is beginning a global transformation of thought and action unprecedented in human history. This change includes, but is not limited to, shifts in value systems, new scientific knowledge, the growth of a global economy, and an explosion of communication and information technology.

All of this in the midst of ecological crisis and a reassertion of the human spirit. This upheaval is unprecedented because its scope is worldwide, and many major shifts are coinciding. The rate of change is the fastest ever. The interrelated and revolutionary insights and experiments emerging in all institutions and across all disciplines are more extensive than ever before. This metamorphosis is a large creative process with complex underlying patterns of violence, disruption, and death and, at the same time, creativity, synthesis, and integration.

People cannot stop this cataclysmic reordering that is, at least, the end of the industrial era and the beginning of a new age in the human experience. Within the destruction of one worldview are the seeds of another (or others). Life is creating and organizing itself.

We can neither control this large creative process nor can we predict the future accurately. Outcomes will depend on the choices people make daily and on unknown global dynamics. We live in a painful, confusing, exciting and frightening time of transition.

Life in most organizations reflects the turmoil of the larger world as enterprises struggle to change in relationship with the larger world. Leaders want their organizations to survive, adapt to a world of paradox and unpredictable change, and evolve in ways that will position them for continued existence. Most leaders want the enterprise to move faster, want to enhance employee quality of work-life, want to improve customer satisfaction, increase flexibility and creativity, and want to achieve outstanding financial results.

Leaders and followers want to feel good about who they are and what they do. People want to believe their work is important and contributes to something greater than themselves.

Once leaders, managers, and employees establish these laudable objectives many, sadly, race unconsciously to achieve them. They make a crucial mistake in failing to understand that a new external reality requires new beliefs to guide decisions and behavior.

Unaware of the false beliefs driving them in a changing marketplace that requires new responses, they rush to control the unseen forces propelling them into the future.

People scurry mindlessly from activity to activity trying to push from consciousness the awareness that their actions are futile. Lacking insight into their needs and confidence in their judgment, leaders try new program after new program hoping desperately that something, anything, will rescue them in their efforts to survive, adapt, and evolve in the world's changing marketplace.

Leaders might begin with bench marking, reengineering, customer focus, continuous improvement, large group interventions, and total quality management. Then they may move on to diversity, empowerment, self-managed teams, employee involvement, and cross-functional teams.

Finally, leaders might focus on delayering, right-sizing, core competencies, organizational transformation, and becoming a learning organization, and on and on. Few of the new programs are internalized by anyone as new ways to value, think, feel, and behave. Instead, some behavior is changed only temporarily.

Change programs are the Prozac of the 90s for organizations. And most leaders do not know how to lead others through change. Most people, apparently, want a one-page list of instructions for an easy and painless mechanical fix that guarantees results and takes pain away quickly. This magical thinking is not possible; sustainable change is difficult, takes time, and requires new thinking and new skills.

Inner bewilderment matches the external floundering of many organizations. Substance is lacking -- appearance is everything. Cynicism and distrust are rampant. People see a new meanness in themselves and others. Courage is rare, fear is great, and selfishness and greed are expected. Tremendous pressure exists to conform, and those in authority reject authenticity. Many want to control, and few want to risk. Problems are bombarded with will power.

People have no heroes or heroines to emulate. Myths are forgotten -- rituals discarded. People don't take time for grieving, wandering, or celebrating. The past is romanticized even as its lessons are forgotten. Many refuse to accept responsibility for themselves and their impact on others.

High percentages of people doubt the honesty and competency of their leaders. Individuals have lost faith in one another and confidence in the future. People do not feel alive; they are in turmoil -- exhausted and afraid. They feel crazy and risk losing their humanity. The time approaches when people in organizations will no longer be able to repress the humiliation of the human spirit prevalent in many soul-less workplaces.

Soon this frenetic activity leads to inevitable conclusions. Organizations have disappointing change efforts, cynical, exhausted, and disillusioned employees, baffled and often unemployed leaders, and a few rich consultants who move on to spread their false hope of quick-fixes to other needy clients. Despite this insanity, organizations sometimes enjoy short-term financial success (at the expense of future generations), and their superficial success masks even greater possibilities of what might have been.

These dysfunctional and fear-driven dynamics are clear when one observes the political life of the United States. The president, a gifted, likable, and flawed man (like many leaders throughout history), is pursued relentlessly by the frightened, hypocritical, and self-righteous who do not see within themselves what they condemn in him. In their corrupt and shadowy pursuit of what they consider to be evil, they themselves become more insidiously black-hearted than the repentant sinner they pursue.

The mindless media are compliant accomplices as they rush madly to be first to tattle unaware that the president's behavior is not the real story: our loss of privacy, discretion, and fair process is the story as an attempt at a bloodless coup enters its seventh year.

Politicians, cowardly and out of touch with what is real, look to the next opinion poll before taking a position on the issues. Arrogant and agenda-driven pundits pontificate endlessly and are frustrated that the public no longer looks to the “elites” for guidance.

Excessive exposure on television reveals most of them to be manipulative charlatans unworthy of followership. A national madness grips the United States as a small minority strives mightily to preserve a worldview that has been eclipsed. Meanwhile the serious issues confronting the nation and world are denied.

Where is the leadership? What will the unintended consequences of this madness be? Will citizens do what they so often do in their organizational roles -- collude with this insanity through their fearful indifference -- or will the wisdom and outrage within the people emerge, and will they break out of this addictive cycle and exert their judgment at the ballot box?

I believe the insanity in our institutions and organizations represents the collapse of the mechanistic worldview -- locally, globally, politically, individually, and organizationally. This worldview has alienated humans from nature, from one another, and from themselves. The insanity we see is the externalization of a loss of vision, a failure of purpose, and a collapse of values. Most efforts to change our institutions attack symptoms only. The problem is not “out there” but is “within us” rooted in beliefs that do not work in solving today's global, national, and organizational problems. We need new beliefs (and a recommitment to some old values) to live by.

The times in which we live plead for leadership at all levels and in all institutions. Many people are troubled by the mediocre leadership and the disappointing efforts to change organizations to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

James MacGregor Burns wrote in Leadership, “The crisis of leadership today is the mediocrity or irresponsibility of so many of the men and women in power. . . .” This view is supported by Thomas Teal in Harvard Business Review, “. . . mediocre management is the norm” (November/December, 1996). Mediocre leadership leads to mediocre organizations filled with unrealized potential.

In Latin the word mediocre means “halfway up the mountain.” In many organizations, people have climbed halfway to the peak and have forsaken the quest to the top for the illusions of security and entitlement. Mediocrity has become normal for many.

Some say we either have no leaders in organizations, or at least no good ones. Today's reality only appears to be that way. Many industrial era managers are still in positions of power and will not step aside willingly. Some will adapt -- many will not.

Many of the people who will lead in new organizations are still developing themselves: they are in transition -- learning and growing. Some are buried in organizations and will ascend slowly as the leadership transition evolves. Their ascent will be hastened by the disappointing change efforts occurring throughout industry. The leaders we need will emerge if they can be protected from those clinging to a fading worldview.

Emerging leaders must take a journey within if they are to internalize this shift in worldview and formulate new beliefs and lead organizational transformation. The journey begins deep in the machine metaphor of people and organizations. The engine runs faster and faster in a frenetic and futile effort to control uncontrollable forces.

Soon the machine will fail from rebellion, exhaustion, and abandonment. Our travels take us out of the abyss of the machine metaphor to a lively, surprise filled, and ever-changing world of creativity and meaning -- a world rich with potential and possibility. Once the journey begins, the traveler becomes an artist as well as an adventurer. Life is the canvas; choices are the palette.

The journey within involves a deep re-examination of values, beliefs, and assumptions, and a rejection of conceptual rules that have outlived their usefulness. If sustainable organizational change is to occur, the change in metaphor from organizations as machines to organizations as living systems is the fundamental shift that must take place in the psyche of the workplace.

This shift in worldview will bring the caring, the feeling, the ethical, the aesthetic, the spiritual, the ecological, and the immeasurable to organizational life. This change is not easy. Some will say, “but we made this shift in the sixties.” Perhaps some of us made the intellectual shift but one cannot live out an organic model in a mechanistic way, and most organizations are built on a mechanistic mental model.

People talked about this shift in metaphor, expected it, but have not lived the change. In general our organizations and societies have become more lawless, ruthless, violent, cynical, and alienated. Many of our organizations are dying -- deservedly so. The crises of the day are necessary for transformation. The insanity we are living is the opportunity.

This re-examination is emotional and difficult. The reward will be a shift of thinking, understanding, feeling, being, and behaving that is internalized and endures. Then, instead of relying on mindless, mechanical formulas for meaningless change, mindful and enlightened leaders will utilize their wisdom, maturity, and judgment to do the right thing, in the right way, at the right time, to fit the unique reality of their organization. I believe this journey within is the personal intellectual, psychological, and spiritual transformation of consciousness that people must make if they want to lead sustainable organizations in a sustainable world. Does anyone not want a sustainable world for their children and grandchildren?

The times in which we live are uncertain, dangerous, and unpredictable. People are vulnerable. Security and control are illusions. A new worldview offers only hope and possibility -- not guarantees. We should not be hasty to identify with a new paradigm, worldview, or philosophy. If we identify closely with any school of thought or profession we will have to embrace their views and follow their rules. Strive instead to identify with life itself and endeavor to understand life's natural creative process and to live life accordingly always open to new insights. As a former teacher once said, “it is in your self-interest not to have your perspective limited by your self-interest.”

Transformation requires courage, service, sacrifice, and intellectual vigor. We cannot look to traditional sources for leadership. Will enough people want to learn and transform how they think and act in the world and in organizations? No one can predict what history will be, but as Danah Zohar and Iam Marshall wrote in The Quantum Society:

There are no messiahs. There is nobody here to act but us. There is nobody to act for us, nobody to save us. We are the messiah. The job of transforming ourselves and saving the world is down to us.

It may be later than we think.