Rethinking organisations[1]

Tony Stevenson[2]  

Today's viable organisations are visionary. Their leaders and key players are clear thinking, and can see well beyond both next year's budget as well as the fashionable herd instinct of economic and technological hype recently infecting investment markets.  

They are not afraid to experiment; not afraid to make mistakes. Neither are they hung up on efficiency for its own sake. They focus on new knowledge, creativity, and novel products and services. Instead of looking back over their shoulders at their competitors, they can lift their vision forwards to new horizons.

  Also, key people in viable organisations think critically. They can peel back the layers of meaning to get deep under the surface; to see the values and worldviews underpinning the prevailing doctrine. They see the futility of the ideology responsible for aggressive, antisocial consumption that puts market relationships at risk, long-term, as well as the human asset stripping of predatory organisations.  

Viable organisations are not like the corporate "godzillas" described by Japanese management thinker, Kenichi Ohmae. While godzillas may be extreme examples, they do give an idea of the limited, ingrained thinking within many organisations.  

Godzillas, Ohmae says, are "genetically programmed to grow and consume markets and resources" at rates once deemed unthinkable. They are not to be confused with first-rate blue-chip companies, and innovative new firms, that have entrepreneurial fervour.

  The godzilla mentality is founded in a closed rationality that claims to be the solution to the problems it has created -- something Albert Einstein warned against. It favours short-term, exclusionary thinking and either/or logic, denying pluralism and fuzzy logic, not to mention life's nuances.  

The mindset that such a mentality forms part of is self-serving, creating its own "logic" of a straight-up-and-down clockwork world, void of complexities, paradoxes and enchantments. It is as if reason must proceed free of any social, cultural or ecological context, as if there is no other way of seeing reality.  

The ability to see across various mindsets is prized by the polymath, Gregory Bateson. At the bottom of his hierarchy of learning is behavioural conditioning, as with Pavlov's dog. Then we learn how to learn by developing learning strategies. Ultimately, we learn to make sense across various ways of knowing, developing what he called a metacommunication.  

Navigating the new, young century may demand new insights for people and organisations keen to remain viable. In an age when the innovative processes for organisational change and learning have been overridden by the bean counters, we are seeing the shape and benefits of alternative mindsets that value long-term thinking, cooperation, openness, compassion, inclusiveness and the interdependency of community and economy within nature's ecology.

  A mindset is characterised by a set of values and thinking processes. But it is much more. It has at its foundation, deep below the surface, a way of seeing the world, a way of seeing change and reality. It has formed deep within our consciousness and most of us are unaware of it.

  For example, Westernised culture most commonly sees the individual as the core social unit, whereas traditional Chinese would favour a human relationship. A conscious recognition of mindset is more likely to be acknowledged by people who have intensively engaged in cross-cultural experiences.

  The dominant mindset

But first, let's look some more at the dominant mindset. It centres on a mutant rationality with roots back more than two millennia. Over time it has been modified to serve vested interests.  

The dominant mindset is widely evident, but there are welcome, notable exceptions in today's organisations.

  At the threshold of the new millennium, the dominant mindset remains in the hands of the ruling elite, in this case those who hold the key to the global economy, and their courtiers, the technocrats and politicians, and many professional and academic experts. Most of these are from the industrialised West, but they have been joined more recently by the rich, powerful and famous in what are still called the poorer countries.  

The dominant mindset, over the past couple of decades or so, has competed head-on with the good work done by organisational theorists and practitioners in the name of organisational psychology, organisational change and development and, more recently, the learning organisation. The financial gurus and economists have taken charge, putting the push and pull of the market, and the bottom line, ahead of other considerations, including often the wellbeing of customers and employees.

  Product obsolescence can hurt customers in the long run. Among other things, it has an environmental downside. Look for example at the much feted IT industry. There are about 500 million computers, in the United States alone, no longer being used, posing a serious waste-disposal problem for unwanted tin and silicon. The social and ecological consequences of their marketing got lost in the hype.  

The shortsightedness of too many numbers-driven masters also endangers the demand for products in their own economic system, when they so ruthlessly shed staff and deplete them of their buying power as consumers.

Furthermore, downsizing and casualisation, in the cause of abstractions such as corporatisation and privatisation, have harmed more real factors such as a satisfying job and economically sound local communities. Further, the historical memory of many firms has been sent to the recycle bin. And work teams, an idea of the 1970s, have been disbanded.  

Of course, some of the historical memory was getting very mouldy indeed. But the dominant mindset has been hoisted to a pedestal of privilege from where it surveys all it commands. It seeps into the personal lives of people in the name of global competitiveness.

  Taken for granted

Regardless of one's political ideology, the big problem is that the present form of rationality goes virtually unchallenged. Too many people take it for granted as the conventional "wisdom".

  It is taken for granted in much the same way that a fish probably takes for granted the water it swims in. How does a fish see water? Does it critically assess its watery envelope? And, for that matter, do we human stop to think critically about the worldview that engulfs us?

  Taking things for granted is not necessarily a sign of low intelligence. By putting our thinking and our perceptive faculties on automatic pilot, we are not challenging our entrenched assumptions, or critically analysing our world, or our view of it. In this way we may be in grave danger of mistaking our familiar illusions for reality.

  I first awoke to my own perceptual blindness, and how much I had taken for granted, about 20 years ago. My postgraduate supervisor asked for the name of the event when the darkness fades and the sky becomes light again. 'Sunrise' was his most common answer. But, he said, he had just come in from Mars. He had not seen the sun rising relative to the earth. If anything, the earth was setting. It was more an earthset than a sunrise. It all depends where one stands.

  Since early childhood I had stood in the smog of industrialised thinking that hides behind the respectability of rationality. But in this sense, reason is a system of thought that has been taken out of context. It neglects its social and ecological environment. It is applied in the service of the social superstructure, too often without the restraint of an ethical structure.

  Mort recently, reason has been restricted to the market place, and most recently to the system of a so-called free-trading global market place. It is as if the market has no grounding in any community, or regional and global society, or the natural environment. Thus it has been called economic rationalism. It casts aside what economists call exogenous variables -- factors outside the market, the externalities.

  This is demonstrated with humour in a recent cartoon in the Australian Financial Review. A leading politician, no prize for guessing, says: "Just because there's some vague chance we might stuff up the world's climate forever, you want us to risk the economy?"

  Limits to reason

Canadian thinker, and former business executive, John Ralston Saul, has explained how rationality has become the mainstay for seeing and organising our world. Reason, he says, like religions, presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created.

Reason is at the core of the dominant mindset. It comes originally from ancient Greece. More than two centuries ago it was promoted by the French rationalists, particularly Voltaire, to counter the demeaning vagaries of court life. With the European Enlightenment it sought to counter medieval superstition.  

In its present incarnation, perhaps like most single thought systems, the rationalist mentality has become self-serving.

  Saul believes that Voltaire would be outraged by the new structures that have somehow deformed the changes he struggled for. As for his descendants -- our ruling elites -- he would deny all legal responsibility. He would fight them, as he once fought the courtiers and the priests of eighteenth-century Europe.

  The knowledge keepers

The dominant mindset also relies on a body of arcane knowledge, specialised rather than generalised. Knowledge has become the new commodity of the powerful, with certain professionals acting as the keepers of specialist knowledge.

  As Saul has said, 'Never before in history have there been such enormous elites carrying such burdens of knowledge'. Their power depends not on how they use that knowledge but on how they control its use.

  He believes we have created an illusion of the most sophisticated society in human history. But in reality, knowledge has been carved up into feudal fiefdoms of expertise. This has made general understanding and coordinated action not simply impossible but despised and distrusted. Expertise is valued more highly than experience.  

The powerful use knowledge and language to control others. As Noam Chomsky says, this is done not by articulating a doctrine -- that would invite reflection and inquiry -- but by drilling it home so that it becomes the only condition for discourse. I can't help thinking that global capital is doing this right now with regard to global free trade.

  George Orwell warned that even in a liberal democracy, an orthodoxy becomes a body of ideas that, it is assumed, all right-thinking people will accept without question.

  That is why power structures are frightened of criticism, having long tried to deny the general public access to knowledge. Book burnings may have stopped, but access to knowledge is monitored even today, and too often locked down. In our universities a war is now raging to prevent downgrading critical thinking over the functional skills and know-how eagerly sought by the establishment.

  Grumblings in the corridors

But this mindset is being challenged. Many people have learned critical thinking at school and in the humanities. Schools have taught ecology, and there are signs of linking economics with ecology, most recently at the level of the federal government.

  Also, there are a growing bands of disenchanted, hurt by downsizing, so-called free trade and other forms of institutional bullying.

  There is new cynicism of the jargon that endlessly chants commercial reality, value adding, business plan, economic growth, workplace reform, deregulation and global competitiveness -- without thought for the human consequences. Ideas of economic warfare, slashing costs and thrashing another marketing team echo values of the macho locker room. But these ideas are not compatible with the values most people were taught at home when they were kids.

  I find more and more each day that, once I get to know such jargon sprouters, they admit to disliking the set of values expected in the corridors of power. But they feel obliged to uphold the jargon and the doctrine in the name of commerce, politics or sport. They confess to another set of personal values much closer to those of their childhood.

  Loss of imagination

Another critique of the dominant mindset brings us to one of today's emerging issues. The received "wisdom" is so ubiquitous that it is destroying human imagination. And if we are really entering a new knowledge era, we will need all the creative imagination possible.

  A Romanian sociologist friend, Dan Chirabuca, recently told me that young people in Eastern Europe had high hopes for their future just after the fall of the wall. Now, a decade later, they have succumbed to the mind-numbing uniformity of mass media, a Los Angelisation of the mind.

  The entertainment media are the engine rooms of the global marketplace, because they both rely on and promote consumerism. This powerful force is destroying the diversity of human imagination.

  As Dan said, when he was a kid in Romania, the sky was the limit of young people's imagination. But no more. It comes via television and the cinema, and, increasingly, the Internet. So the keepers of the dominant mindset in the organisational world, are capturing globally the imagination of our young people.

  British neuroscientist, Susan Greenfield, believes that the plasticity of the human brain may be harmed by the uniformity of images that stimulate the brain by using information technologies.

  Pluralist mindset

It seems that we need to heed British-Russian philosopher, Isiah Berlin. He reminds us that life can be seen through many windows, none of them necessarily clear or opaque, less or more distorting than the others.  

Thus, any single viewpoint, as well as any mindset, limits our view of life's complexity and diversity. It threatens imagination.

  Orwell is not alone in warning about replacing one orthodoxy with another. The enemy, he says, is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record played at the time.

Navigating the young century may demand plural mindset and alternative insights for people and organisations keen to remain viable.

  As one thought system, rationality does indeed have value. It should not necessarily be thrown out, as the baby with the bath water. But in its current form, stringently controlled through the establishment jargon, it operates within limited boundaries of human perception. And when we get stuck in one way of seeing reality, one narrow framework, we lose our capacity for imagining our futures, for finding new opportunities and inventing new cultures. We can too easily fall back on trying to find answers for the same old intractable problems.

  It seems the mindshift needed for viable organisations, those that want to venture far into the future, would be an epistemological pluralism. This would help understand, and accept, the multiple thought frameworks of various civilisations, while appropriately using traditional Western reason. We may even have to invent new ways of thinking in order to envision the future ahead.  

A start would be to realise the limitations of an either/or world. We may have to embrace the value of and.  

The dominant mindset favours an argumentative culture, toggling between either-or. Our politics today is adversarial, either left or right, often a futile argument. Our legal system is adversarial and argumentative, as well. As in competitive sport, one side cheers for us and not them.

  From or to and

A mindshift that values and, over either-or, could consider the notion of individual liberty and social cohesion, rather than the present dominant polemics of individual liberty or social cohesion. Pluralism makes it easier to accept the "triple bottom line" that recognises economic, social and ecological performance. There may be other bottom lines, too.

  Similarly, we can see the wisdom of corporate social responsibility. A pluralist mindset would not rank shareholders above other players. It would seek harmony among all organisational partners, including customers, employees, suppliers -- as well as investors.

  One such new mindset could look like this:

·        Long-term thinking -- consideration of the consequences for future generations

·        Collaboration as more appropriate than competition for forming lasting relationships

·        "Win-win" outcomes, with benefits for investors and society; employees and customers

·        Open negotiation instead of closed-door deal-making

·        Collaboration in place of divide-and-rule, or automatic opposition and argument

·        Business and government in the service of all, not just the biggest or wealthiest

·        Appropriate use of technologies, including social technologies

·        Recognition and understanding of other mindsets or worldviews.

  How does a mindshift of this nature happen? In the longer-term a mindsets can change through the educational system. Such a generational change has been seen in the way most younger people now accept the idea of ecology, although sometimes complacently.

  To see a shorter-term mindshift, we may have to return to the organisational change theories and practices that have more recently taken a back seat. The idea of action learning is helpful, particularly experiences that challenge the dominant paradigm with alternatives -- to ensure that we do not take for granted the way we give meaning to our reality.

  I make a plea for new tools of thought. We may need to make these active learning processes more visionary and inclined to pluralist worldviews. I would advocate anticipatory action learning.  

This may help us navigate the young century with creativity and compassion, ensuring social and organisational longevity.  

Speeches~briefings/Futures Foundation/Rethinking organisations.doc 16 August 2000