Instead of asking “What can I do to stop feeling so anxious?”, “What can I do to save the planet?” or “What hope is there?”, people with privilege seem to be asking “Who am I?” and “How am I connected to all of this?”
Sarah Jaquette Ray
We're all having an identity crisis (at least those of us used to comfort and privilege are).
Viva the Crisis!
Public agencies from schools to water corporations and especially government departments (but also many larger private enterprises) are grappling with how they fit into the larger eco-system of structures. How do they reconfigure our sprawling, sclerotic institutions and businesses to fit a need that is ever-expanding and polymorphic; structures that privilege hierarchical accountability but are being asked to deliver shared responsibility and; cultural norms and artifacts embedded in what we call 'work' that were developed in an age of (white) male privilege and unconstrained growth and now need to accommodate (and celebrate) diversity and inclusion (something I often teach is that the organising principals that underpin reliable delivery and emergent creativity are NOT the same. See HERE to get a glimpse how to organise for each).
George Megalogenis recently wrote a great article in The Age where he pinned the seemingly sudden demand to actually apply the standards we have been espousing for decades on what he called a cultural recalibration. He was writing about the ever-expanding imbroglio submerging our government around work-place culture and behaviour towards women, but the concept applies (and he meant it to apply) much more broadly.
We are experiencing a fundamental change in social expectations around the world and across the board: social, environmental and increasingly financial governance. #metoo, Black Lives Batter, Extinction Rebellion... the list goes on:
What was ok in terms of behaviour, accountability and even fundamental organising principles ten years ago (or even 2 years ago) simply isn’t ok anymore!
These standards are not new. What IS new is the seemingly sudden, and broad-based demand that we actually apply them!
Why is this happening? Why is it happening now?
Asking this is not (or not only) intellectual snobbery. The answer has real-world implications: if you diagnose the wrong drivers of change you will, invariably, diagnose the wrong response!
1. Complexity
It is a truism that things are getting more complex and getting more complex faster. It is equally common to identify this as the source of our organisational soul-searching. It is, but that's not much of an answer because it doesn't leave you with any scope for change - it's a bit like saying the sky is blue.... yes... and?
2. Consciousness
The study of evolutionary consciousness is a booming field and helps explain a lot the seemingly incomprehensible in the world right now - like why environmental policies are so challenging to implement and the rise of Donald Trump (if you want to read the latest and best, you simply can’t go past The Listening Society – a mind-blowing book). It also explains why we are experiencing George's cultural recalibration.
As that the average level increases so too does the range of things people feel are not ok anymore (this goes some way to explaining the Cancel Culture phenomenon where people expressing values authentic to them are shunned by other people for whom those same terms represent different values).
The Crusades we quite literally fought as an ACT OF LOVE.
That made sense at the 'average' level of consciousness in Europe at the time
Luckily, the scope of what ‘love’ means has expanded a bit since then and we have to find other justifications for invading other countries and killing people.
3. A Deadline
Deadlines drive performance. We all know it and it is as true in the field of culture as it is in the field of productivity.
Without a deadline we all ‘faff around’. We talk a lot, take a lot of actions, say all the right things, but won’t deal with the really challenging stuff… until we HAVE TO!
What’s our Deadline?
I was working with the WWF last week leading a foresight process exploring both the big trends and the weak signals impacting conservation and conservation agencies (weak signals are those hard-to-catch pre-trends that invariably catch us all blindside - like COVID!).
The time horizon for the exercise was 20 years but the consensus in this group of highly knowledgeable people was that:
we have ten years to turn make the requisite changes
or be completely overwhelmed.
I won’t go into what ‘overwhelmed’ means because you already know.
In case there is any residue of vapid optimism it is worth noting that throughout history, most societies have failed to successfully navigate their relevant existential crises. The only difference between our current crisis is that, for the first time, it is existential for everyone, not just one society or one geographic area (see ‘Collapse’ by Jared Diamond).
So, we’ve got ten years
We’ve said this before, but no-one was listening. This time we are because it’s actually true!
Sometime in the 1990’s we realised that wasn’t completely true and entered a period of what Hanzi Freinacht calls ‘vapid optimism’ - the assumption that something will happen to fix things because the alternative is too horrible to countenance (the seminal insights we’re only now internalising were written in 1962 and 1970 respectively: Silent Spring and Limits of Growth. Both great studies in the importance of Futures Thinking!)
To avoid the looming deadline, we did what all good procrastinators do: we partied harder!
Last year brought home for many of us that our espoused values were not the same as outlived values (see a piece I wrote on this HERE). We did the work to align them at home, now we’re doing that work to align them in the public sphere!
I feel like this cultural recalibration is the ontological equivalent of rolling our sleeves up. We have collectively realised it’s time to get to work and now we’re getting our integrity in so we’re ready to do the really hard yakka
We do this work using foresight processes, but putting it out there and listening can sometimes be enough (see HERE for the program outline).
So, have you the courage to put it out there and see?
If you're interested in the foresight or other programs we run, feel free to:
1. Book a quick chat HERE
2. Request my White Paper "Implementing Ambitious Strategies: from co-design to co-delivery" email me
3. Request the "Practical Foresight Guide" to help organisations prepare for the unpredictable email me