Much of today’s organizational management mindset—whether corporate, nonprofit, government institution, or startup—is rooted in a flawed logic about how the world works.
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“We have been, and still are, in the grips of a flawed view of reality—a flawed paradigm, a flawed worldview—and it pervades our culture, putting us on a biological collision course with collapse.” |
Central to this flawed logic is a control-based, oppositional mindset with a tendency to polarize and reduce life’s tensions into separations: organisms separate from their environment, God separate from creation, us separate from them, yin separate from yang, mind separate from matter, and rational analytical thought separate from embodied and intuitive ways of knowing.
“We have created a sufficiently strong propensity not only to make divisions in knowledge where there are none in Nature, and then to impose the divisions on Nature, making the reality thus comfortable to the idea, but to go further, and to convert the generalizations made from observation into positive entities, permitting for the future these artificial creations to tyrannize over the understanding.” |
This “logic of separation” has profound implications for Western philosophic and socioeconomic systems, culminating in the “mind divorced from matter” materialism of the Age of Reason that still pervades our worldview today. The origins of Western philosophy, however, drew from a deeper wisdom that transcended this logic of separation. For instance, Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Plato sought to attune with the “wisdom of Sophia” permeating throughout Nature, an understanding of life’s tensions that transcends the shallow ego-mind’s reductive tendency to polarize and separate.
And yet, over time, due to various contributing factors, our culture has become mired in this logic of separation. Our ways of knowing and attending to life have been acculturated at deep and partly unconscious levels, infecting how we relate with our own sense of self, with each other, and with the world around us.
For example, in the West there is a deeply held philosophical belief among the well educated that decision-making ought to be separated from the undertaking of the work itself: Strategic thinking and layers of management control are separate from labor, and labor itself is separated and reduced into departmental “economies of scale” for normalization, management, and control. This separation is espoused by the scientific-management theories of Taylorism, industrial and post-industrial productivity, and the quantification-obsessed ethos of management by numbers. It is a reductionist, mechanistic logic, a hallmark of the Age of Reason.
Today we find all too many organizations caught up in a top-down, hierarchic, KPI-obsessed, siloed, and control-based mentality. Although it’s assumed that such an approach to work enhances efficiencies and effectiveness, in reality it undermines and erodes the greatness of our workplaces, turning them into places of drudgery, stress, political infighting, and ineffective bureaucracies.
Instead of focusing on our sense of purpose, on quality output and creating value for stakeholders while also undertaking enjoyable, enriching, and productive work, attention is taken up with “people management,” “activity management,” “production management,” and “budget control,” techniques aimed at managing units and numbers. The interrelational, holistic, and humane spirit of work is reduced into little more than reporting line items.
Organizational specialist John Seddon writes:
“Command-and-control management has created service organizations that are full of waste, offer poor service, depress the morale of those who work in them, and are beset with management functions that not only do not contribute to improving the work, but actually make it worse. The management principles that have guided the development of these organizations are logical—but it’s the wrong logic.” |
Peter Senge notes that the biggest challenge facing leaders and managers today is this transformation from linear, mechanistic, control-based logic to systemic, organic, emergent, and embodied ways of operating and organizing where the organization is understood as a flourishing living being rather than a mechanistic machine.
The good news is, we are on the cusp of a radical sea change in how we perceive our ways of operating and organizing, moving from:
• Economies of scale to economies of flow
• Linear thinking to systemic thinking and being
• Siloed units of production to systems of interrelations
• Measurement-focused to purpose-focused
• Dominator model to partnership model
• Machine mentality to living organization
“The organization of the future will be an embodiment of community, based on shared purpose, calling on the higher aspirations of people.” |
Attempting to transform our ways of operating and organizing toward humane, sustainable businesses without addressing this flawed mindset is like applying the preverbal Band-Aid to a systemic illness. Isolated initiatives such as “well-being at work,” “mindfulness in the workplace,” “talent management,” “open innovation,” “closed-loop economics,” or “corporate responsibility” are useful in themselves and can have catalytic effects, yet if they leave an organization’s underlying culture and ethos unchallenged, they ultimately fail to deliver transformative change toward flourishing, resilient firms of the future.
We need to deal with root causes as well as the detrimental downstream effects this logic creates: unsustainable operations, mental health issues, lack of morale, low levels of creativity and performance, and inflexibility in times of volatility, among others.
Firms of the past | Firms of the future |
Top-down hierarchy | Locally attuned |
Control ethos | Learning ethos |
Remote management by numbers | Distributed decision-making |
Bureaucratic | Participatory, self-organizing |
Short-term maximization for shareholders | Value-creation for stakeholders |
Competition-orientated | Collaboration and co-creativity |
Private ownership and control | Open source, open innovation |
Self-preservation/maximization | In service of something greater |
Exploitation and enslavement | Empathy and empowerment |
To change management thinking, one can’t simply change the roles and measures (although that helps). To truly change our ways of organizing and operating, we need to change our philosophy, our ways of thinking and knowing, our perception of how the world works, and our sense of place and purpose within this deeply wise world. No small feat.
Let’s take a moment to ask ourselves these questions:
• Why are we here doing what we are doing?
• What are we in business for? What is the real underlying purpose?
• What value are we delivering to society? What about to the wider fabric of life?
• Do we wish our activities to help or hinder life?
• What do we deeply love doing?
• How can our work resonate more strongly with this love and a deeper sense of purpose?
There are many examples of organizations, varying in size and sector, that are actively challenging yesterday’s logic while exploring new ways of operating and organizing: Semco, Sounds True, Natura, Patagonia, Weleda, and Interface, to name a few.
There is a metamorphosis occurring in our midst. As with the metamorphosis of a caterpillar to a butterfly, the initial stages of transformation are resisted by the incumbent dominant paradigm, yet as more “imaginal cells” of the new way form into clusters, a tipping point is reached where wider understanding and acceptance of these transformative ways of operating and organizing systemically forms.
We live in a volatile time of great potential. Do we wish to be a part of the emerging future or hold on fearfully to old ways of working? It’s time to transform. Time to let go of old ways and allow the new to emerge. It’s time to lead with courage beyond fear.
To explore “the new paradigm” further, join the Facebook community here.
First published Nov. 10, 2015, on The Nature of Business blog.
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