Dancing at the Edge

Competence, Culture and Organization in the 21st Century

Graham Leicester, Maureen O'Hara

• Publisher: Triarchy Press
• ISBN:
  9781908009289
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Development
• Index: Business

In his 1980 essay, The World of Tomorrow and the Person of Tomorrow, the psychologist Carl Rogers contemplated the future. He described those who would usher in this new era as people with the capacity to understand, bring about and absorb a paradigm shift. He added: "I have an uneasy feeling about this chapter… It is a beginning, an outline, a suggestion… I believe that what I am saying here will some day be fleshed out much more fully, either by me or someone else." Maureen O'Hara and Graham Leicester are uniquely qualified to flesh out Carl Rogers's vision (Maureen worked closely with Rogers for many years). Here they explore the competencies – the ways of being, doing, knowing and organising - that can help us navigate in complex and powerful times. They argue that these competencies are innate and within reach of all of us – given the right setting, plenty of practice and some gentle guidance. But they are seldom seen because they are routinely undervalued in today's culture. That must change, the authors insist, and this book is intended to begin that change. The book is based on the authors' extensive research and their practical experience observing the qualities demonstrated by some of today's most successful cultural, political and business leaders.

PART ONE:

THE CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT

CHAPTER 1: POWERFUL TIMES

Powerful Times Foretold

FOR several decades now a growing chorus of commentators, researchers, visionaries of the future and acute observers of the present have been tracking the story of a world changing so fast and so fundamentally that it is spiralling beyond our capacity to understand or control.

The narrative of crisis, upheaval and threatened collapse is now well honed, with observers of governance, economics and environmental sustainability painting a vivid and often bleak picture of a world full of surprises, questioning our competence to deal with the fast moving realities we face.

This has been coming for some time. By the early decades of the 20^th century the realization that modernity had unexpected side effects in the form of massive destabilization was already clear. Philipp Blom marks the great Paris exhibition of 1900 as the start of what he calls ‘the vertigo years’ – an unsettling time for the ‘nervous generation’ living through the great changes leading up to the First World War.¹⁰ Empires were crumbling. The 600-year-old Ottoman Empire fell to its Young Turks in 1913. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in Serbia provoked the Great War a year later. The Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian Czars in 1917. The Irish revolution separated northern Unionists from southern Catholics. And the Austro-Hungarian Empire fell in 1918, shortly after its defeat in the bloodiest war in history.

The power of the British Empire peaked and fell into decline, outstripped by Germany and the United States, more adept at the processes of 20^th-century industrialization. Across the old world new constitutions were drawn up that sought to enshrine the U.S. ideal of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people.’ For peasant, bourgeois and aristocratic people alike, this was cultural terra nova at the time and it was not at all clear how it would all hold together.

But that was only part of the challenge. While political upheavals tossed millions into a crisis of identity, in the worlds of science and philosophy other destabilizing shifts were under way. Physicists began to figure out that – at least at subatomic levels – reality was stranger than Newton’s tidy laws had suggested. It seemed that matter was not a simple structure of atomic billiard balls, but could in fact act like either particles or waves and was not solid substance at all but a concentration of energy.

At almost the same time Jan Smuts (who for a time was Prime Minister in South Africa) was developing a system of non-reductionist thinking called ‘holism’ which proposed that the behavior of an entity could not necessarily be inferred from observation of its constituent parts. It was an insight destined to transform how we think about human systems, challenging a reductionist tradition that stretched back to Descartes.

In 1930, not long before he was forced to flee Germany, Freud wrote Civilization and its Discontents in which he examined the social and psychic costs of modernity. He pointed to a growing anxiety that seemed to permeate industrial societies. The poets too felt the seismic scale of the cultural turmoil. In what is surely the clearest call, William Butler Yeats in 1919 invoked images of terror and confusion. “What rough beast” he asked, “slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Through the next decades a steady crescendo of voices was raised, from philosophy, psychology, the natural and social sciences and the humanities, pointing to a gradual unraveling of the social fabric we had taken as the natural order. It seemed that unless we could raise the capacity to respond we were heading for another “dark age.”

By the 1970s, alarm was beginning to spread beyond the state of humanity to the state of the planet itself. In 1972 the Club of Rome warned that an interlocking pattern of global challenges threatened the capacity of the planet to sustain the consumption rate of an ever increasing population. They calculated that the process would run into the buffers of physical resource constraints, the carrying capacity of a single planet. There were, in other words, ‘Limits to Growth.’ ¹¹

But the warning went largely unheeded. In the years since the Second World War the mood, in the West at least, had changed. Critics found the Club of Rome’s analysis overly pessimistic, and claimed that it discounted the power of technological innovation to produce resource efficiencies and new approaches that would free us from the predicted consequences of our actions.

Disquiet at another level was less easy to shake off. How would we be able to cope as human beings with an age of such rapid change, unimaginable new possibilities and the new threat of man-made planetary disaster – be it the slow degradation of the environment or the terrible prospect of ‘mutually assured destruction’?

Don Michael, a founder member of the Club of Rome who started his professional life as a policy adviser in Washington during the early years of the Cold War, began to turn his attention to this more pressing question. He feared for the consequences at a human level of living through a period of substantial turbulence in which individuals and societies were likely to lose their bearings. As he put it in the early 1970s:

“All evidence suggests that, at least for the next couple of decades, the United States will be a highly turbulent society more likely than not, demoralizing itself into a splintered, culturally amorphous state of chronic social crises and catastrophe… All traditional [governance] approaches are likely to be relatively inadequate, and all new approaches are likely to have a high rate of failures as would any experiments performed under such relatively blind and complicated conditions…. We need to acknowledge that, somehow, we have discovered and are ensnared in a new wilderness, a new jungle, and that the skills that got us here are inadequate to get us out. Looking around us, we must acknowledge that we really are lost.” ¹²

This warning too proved too uncomfortable to be taken seriously. Michael found himself increasingly marginalized within groups thinking about the future for his dark vision. It broke faith with the American dream of untroubled progress and the long boom.

Yet he continued to worry about the gap opening up between the requirements of a rapidly changing global context and the skills and capacities we possess as individual human beings and collectives to meet them.

In the early 1990s management theorist Peter Drucker, grounded in the concrete world of economics, governance and organizational practice, was still relatively upbeat about the future – although he too urged a rapid upgrading in our skills in organization, management, leadership and governance to respond to the radically new demands of a ‘post-capitalist society.’ Summing up his sense of the times he wrote:

“Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation…. Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself – its worldview; its basic values; its social and political structures; its arts; its key institutions…. We are currently living through just such a transformation.” ¹³

This is surely where we find ourselves today, living inside a culture in flux (wherever we live) that is supporting neither us nor the planet terribly well. The dominant overarching narratives that might make sense of our world today are ambiguous at best, terminally gloomy at worst. The story of growth and development contradicts the story of resource constraint and the need for one-planet living. The story of connectedness, mobility and opportunity meets its shadow in the war on terror and the clash of civilizations. Every hopeful story inevitably excludes the dispossessed, the ‘haves’ always defined in relation to another group of ‘have nots.’ And hovering over it all is the narrative of apocalypse: the ever more compelling evidence that the human species is already doomed by its previous folly.

We scarcely know where to turn. We are struggling to address critical challenges, one by one, as they occur: bail out the financial system, negotiate emissions targets, set millennium development goals, reform social policy. But the stakes keep on getting higher, the challenges the world is throwing at us more testing. And they all inter-relate. In Gwynne Dyer’s telling metaphor, if avoiding nuclear war in the 20^th century was the equivalent of getting our High School grades, addressing today’s cascade of threats to life as we have lived it these past couple of hundred years will be more like ‘sitting our finals.’ ¹⁴

Disturbing the Psychosphere

THE deeper story about what all this means for the patterning of consciousness, resilience and psychological capacity to cope has not attracted the attention it deserves. We are, after all, psychological beings. We expect our world to act in ways that our mental constructions and emotional responses have evolved to handle. We become deeply unsettled when that is not the case, when we sense a disruption in the psychosphere.¹⁵

That should not surprise us. Human consciousness is astoundingly complex. A healthy human brain contains over 200 million nerve cells or neurons, linked to one another via hundreds of trillions of synapses. Through this system flows information that drives both our actions and how we think and feel about them. But this arrangement is not fixed like wiring in a house with robust and resilient circuits that can be depended on to deliver the same results over time. It is more ephemeral, acting more like waves passing through crowds of individuals locking and unlocking their arms. One instant a connection is made and a signal travels, the next moment the connection is dropped and a new one made to another cell carrying another kind of input. In a vast, dynamic orchestration, sense is made and actions taken. Because memories of past actions persist, learning occurs. This makes the human brain one of the most complex systems we know.

Complex and delicate. Many of its systems – especially those connected to our emotional centers in the amygdala – are easily disturbed. For optimum mental functioning a certain degree of stability in the system is required, against which we notice important changes in patterns of coherence. Consciousness functions better when much of what it deals with can be set on default and taken for granted. It is the awareness of any “difference that makes a difference” as Gregory Bateson put it that enables human beings to be alert to their circumstances, plan for the future and take effective action. When too much is in motion at the same time it is harder for the brain to separate what is important from what is just noise. Certainty becomes more fleeting, mistakes are made more frequently, anxiety increases.

Of course strictly speaking there is no such thing as a ‘human brain’ that can function separately from whole persons who have personalities, aspirations, hearts, stomachs, arms and legs. And there is also no such thing as a person separated from relationships, communities and institutions. Though all mammals have complex brains and smart monkeys can learn and memorize complex behavioral routines, they cannot reflect on their past actions and build a sense of shared meaning that persists beyond their presence. They participate in groups but they don’t build cultures. It is humans who are the consummate institution builders. We have learned that, if patterns of life within human groups can be agreed upon and then taken for granted, and transmitted to new arrivals, we have a better chance of dealing with unexpected challenges. We won’t need to reinvent the wheel, or the farming techniques, or the family rituals. Institutionalization allows us to coordinate the action of groups with economy of effort and minimal social disruption or conflict; it also allows us to achieve something closer to our full potential.¹⁶

The combined result of today’s era of a thousand revolutions is that long-standing frames of perception, cognition and patterns of life – mentalities – through which individual and group dignity and identity is preserved and existential anxieties managed – are breaking down on a global scale.¹⁷ A mismatch has opened between mentalities that were adapted to their time and place and the demands of the world we now inhabit.

Some changes have occurred very quickly: the status of minorities and women for example. Laws and patterns of family life now take for granted the principle that women and men, regardless of race or creed, can expect the same rights, privileges and opportunities. And who could have imagined in 1973, when homosexuality was finally removed from the U.S. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a mental disorder and anti-sodomy laws began to be gradually struck down around much of the Western world, that by 2012 gays and lesbians would be legally married, raising families and appointed to the clergy in mainstream Christian churches?

But the speed of these and other shifts and their acceptance by educated elites hides the deeper cultural story. The massive cultural changes of the 20^th century have not been universally welcomed and the process of forming new social norms that will sustain these new ways of life without backlash or reaction is far from complete, even in relatively tolerant societies. Three examples give pause:

Homeschooling can be seen as an indicator of resistance to changing cultural norms. A substantial rise in the number of children in the U.S. being schooled at home was propelled by a 1970s’ Supreme Court ruling supporting the ban on prayer in schools. Christian parents reacted to what they felt as the tyranny of secular humanism by taking their children out of school and educating them themselves. By 2007 1.5 million children were being schooled at home. According to U.S. Department of Education statistics, the most common reasons given for this are cultural – religion and values, with academic instruction a distant third.¹⁸

Hate movements are another indicator of reaction to change too rapid to accommodate. Hate music arose in the UK in the 1970s as part of the skinhead subculture which emerged in reaction to the rapid influx of South Asian immigrants. At a time when urban violence in general is declining, violence against gays has increased 40% since gay marriage was legalized in the U.S. and hate crimes against African Americans have spiked since America elected its first black president.

Immigration is a smoldering issue in societies in the throes of cultural shifts. The editor of a north of England newspaper, Danny Lockwood, explains the suffering in his home town of Dewsbury as: “A perfect storm. Our civic pride and governance has been systematically stripped away. Our industrial bedrock has gone. Mass immigration has brought all kinds of challenges that we haven’t come close to understanding, let alone dealing with.”¹⁹ A world away, feelings about...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Persons of Tomorrow
• Part One: The Contemporary Context
• Part Two: 21st-Century Competencies
• References
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors