How could we be wrong?

Making sense of reality and leading others in the 21st century

What a collective dark night of the soul 2020 has been! For those of us who are aware that going back to “normal” is a consoling illusion, the world is at a nexus point. If we are not completely captured by powerful, mainstream narratives which have been well-funded and organized for decades, we will be able to connect the dots usefully about what is going on in the world. It is fundamental that we look beyond the surface of events to see what is happening, in particular the greatest concentration of wealth and power in the history of human civilization, and it has only just begun. While millions are suffering in unthinkable ways, also in developed countries, the richest among us are growing their wealth in orders of magnitude while capturing more and more of the essential pillars of democracy and information around the globe. They sit at the top of almost every institution of consequence with a rapidly growing level of influence and power only seen in those moments of history where oppression, subordination and poverty were the widespread and dominant forces of life.

Many of us find these dynamics completely unacceptable, particularly for the world that we are creating for future generations. It is crystal clear that some wide-sweeping changes are necessary. These do not include increased surveillance, obliged vaccination, restricted movement, automation, high unemployment, social distancing, mask-wearing, living through screens enclosed in our homes, emphasis on the family only, AI choosing what we read, watch and think, and big organizations run by the global elite telling us how to behave.

The post-industrial transition

Several centuries of an extractive economy which takes natural resources out of the earth much more quickly than they can be replaced and labour out of people at the cheapest possible price have inevitably concentrated wealth and power in the hands of the few. This economy has brought us here, and all attempts to change it have failed, unless we consider the CCP or Putin’s Russia to be models of success. Whether we like it or not, unless we have intentionally stepped outside the economy, we have all contributed in a certain sense to the difficult conditions we find ourselves in today.

The emergence of the commercial Internet and smartphones have drastically changed markets and organizations. Entrepreneurs can now rapidly scale disruptive business models globally, with access to assets and human services without needing to own those assets or employ the people providing the services. A wide range of powerful technologies has emerged from exponential development in computing, storage and communications capacity. These technologies draw in easy capital and enable entire industries to be turned upside down, with intense competition for talent, customer and funding.

This transformation is also powering a swift breakdown of organizational hierarchy and centralization. Decentralization is in turn leading to a massive change in how we live and organize ourselves to thrive. The Fourth Industrial Revolution being pushed forwards by the World Economic Forum and many governments is not just a technological one. It is a profound transition to a post-industrial civilization. There are huge economic and societal challenges already well underway, but many opportunities too, especially for those who are prepared to step out of extraction for good.

The wealth transfer happening as the world is distracted by Covid-19 and obsessed with being the first to find a miracle cure, is being invested in the physical, digital and financial infrastructure that will ensure power over others as this transition deepens. Immunisation is also a driving force for the implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. These actions arise from fear, doubt and confusion, a need to control life: the illusions of separation. It is not surprising then that separation in its various forms has been the response of most authorities to an infectious viral agent.

From the inside out

However, life is not something that happens to us, even if it feels that way. Life is interdependent, we co-create it through our interactions with one another and the environments around us. We may have all kinds of personal reactions to what is happening in the world, but the hard truth to swallow is that we have all contributed in a certain sense to current world circumstances. Many ordinary people are already poor and the global middle class that has been created in the last decades is rapidly being eroded to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few. The only hope we have to create a fairer world is to build a global alternative.

What shows up around us are reflections, if not direct manifestations, of our own inner world. We tend to run towards things we like and do our best to avoid those we don’t want. Combined with the pressure and expectation to make money, deliver results and always be busy, ours are stressful lives. Now many of the distractions we used to make ourselves feel better have been suspended and new pressures have suddenly arrived — financial hardship, anxiety about getting sick and the uncertainty of the future, the tensions of being with the same people day in day out, not able to have holidays or see our loved ones further afield.

Imagine instead that you are the maker of your own destiny, that you own what you need to be autonomous and can adapt easily to whatever comes your way. Imagine that even in times of contraction, you can lift yourself up and find the positive. You can always reimagine who you believe you are, what you do and how you do it.

Our inner world

Today’s challenging conditions may feel extremely imposed and constricting. A wise first step in learning to thrive them then is to strengthen and harmonise our immune and nervous systems. Taking good care of ourselves in all ways — physically, energetically, emotionally, creatively, mentally, spiritually — means being conscious of what we put in, allow space for, pay attention to. Even when we are feeling really squeezed, we can eat healthy, nourishing food, get fresh air and light when possible, do things we love in the spaces between taking care of everyone and everything else. We can find fun ways to energize ourselves that are within our physical and financial means, but perhaps with a shift of focus away from what previously sustained us. We may need to “un-learn” much of what we did before.

We are living systems, naturally creative, resourceful and resilient. Busy, productive, often stressful lives have taught us to act like machines. Instead, let’s turn off (our devices), wind down and tune into our inner richness and abundance. Let’s discover how to be more present in this moment, without worrying about the past or the future, as our bodies and senses override the movies that run through our minds much of the time. Let’s meditate, go for a walk in a beautiful place if we can, sing, dance, make something fun, feel joyous. As we become more attuned to what is happening inside and out, right now, we can learn to accept what has gone. We will experience that we are replete anyway, and that we have actually been liberated from certain situations and relationships which have reached their natural end.

Another helpful element is to reflect on what makes us anxious, through creative and bodywork, and how we feel about what has gone, to share with others. Alone and together, we can create rituals for support, acceptance and growth. We can become more stable, less susceptible to the changes that life inevitably brings. A strong foundation of gratitude and being generous with all who cross our path bring us deeper into the present moment. When we give, rather than take, abundance flows among us. This flow generates more abundance, not less, as we learn to discern who is ready for our gifts and will exchange in kind, even if not directly with us. Gifts travel in circles. Then we can become true stewards of what we have to offer, bringing our qualities and skillsets to where they have most value.

We can also tune into the present moment collectively, into ourselves, others and the environment around us, even if it is loud and busy. We can surface and share what we sense, individually and together, to begin developing a common narrative about our experience.

Connecting the dots

Being able to make reasonable sense of what is really going on is another essential skill we need to hone. The mainstream narratives are becoming more and more forceful, with media companies censoring anything that questions them as far right “misinformation”, fruit of the imagination of crazy conspiracy theorists or just plain wrong. Without those powerful narratives, some of which have been constructed for decades, the world’s populations would not be following the authoritarian responses to the pandemic that only increase fear and sickness, of all kinds.

If we follow money flows from the media who are heavily promoting the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset, we will find that the owners of that media are often part of the WEF, indeed some sit on their Board. Big tech companies like FB, Twitter, Amazon and Google have been designed to extract value out of their users, making us their commodity and owning our data. Their interests and behaviour are well-known. What we can access, read, watch, learn from, is all determined by their AI. The pharmaceutical industry is one of the areas which is gaining influence and power, putting its greatest promoters in key positions in government and public authorities.

So, it’s important that we actively seek out alternative views, especially those that contradict one another or our own ideas. We need to expand our sense-making capacities to see beneath and beyond the events of everyday life. The most useful question we can ask ourselves is: How could I, we, be wrong?

As well as our own research and pattern identification, there are many tools and techniques now available to connect the dots in ways that bring new meaning to the surface for ourselves and those we interact with.

We would be wise to develop the habit of challenging our values, beliefs and assumptions to see if they fit reality. When they don’t, the difference between what we experience and what we believe to be true, the cognitive dissonance, can be painful. But we must be courageous in being present with it, else we will turn away from truth and follow the herd mentality that the popular narratives are feeding. We will also apply things that worked well in the past to our current situation.

That tendency is particularly obvious in business, particularly in mature economic sectors and organisations. As things are turned upside down, or even fall apart, only the companies that disrupt common sense practices to unleash the solutions, creativity and innovation found in new business and leadership models will prosper. Now is the perfect time to do this, before someone else does it. It is the ideal occasion to develop authentic power and move life in a new direction.

Creating real purpose and value

More and more work will be automated in the coming years, so many more of us will need to become entrepreneurs, or at least gig workers with different sources of income. Employees will also need to develop more intrapreneurial qualities and skills, with organizations more appropriately structured and culturally fit for innovation to add value across entire industries, not just deliver transactional results to their current customers. Many organizations are already beginning to make innovation a key driver of strategy. They must also expand that conversation, however, to see that value is the real engine and measure of their sustainable success, not growth or profitability, and not only in the service industries. Value also goes far beyond keeping stakeholders happy and providing return on investment.

Purpose has become a priority in many organizations but must not be confused with personal meaning. Creating work that people like, that engages them to make them happy and productive may attract talent and recognition, many people love working at Google or Apple. However, the world has much more important challenges to deal with. The narrative tells us we have only 10 years to avoid the impending collapse of our climate, ecosystems, economies and societies. Companies will need to take bold approaches to satisfy growing consumer demand for products and services that are not just about green washing but truly scale solutions to the major crises we are facing together. Value should be considered through the lens of addressing those wider societal needs, that sooner or later will affect all of us. It will be created through constantly disrupting the status quo of extraction to reshape entire industries or give birth to new ones. It will also meet the emerging demand of consumers who have irreversibly modified their habits and characteristics.

Natural organizational resilience

Organizing ourselves at scale to flourish in uncertain, changing conditions that may also be constrained requires our structures to be as flat as their life cycle and sector allow. We need to reduce granularity where possible, focusing on the most important issues rather than creating further complexity where it is not beneficial. Mega-structures with large vertical functions working largely in silos or in a matrix may be robust enough to weather the storm of economic decline but they are not fluid enough to be resilient. Vertical extraction is a mainstay of the current economy, driving efficiency and competing for advantage over others, also internally as organizations and sectors mature. This is the time to step out of these ways of making money and create real value for communities around the world.

Structure and culture go hand-in-hand and cannot be considered separately. An organizational culture that embeds natural resilience is open, curious, creative, experimental, focused and aligned. It demonstrates excellence in its business and operating models and governance, the design of its products and services, and its ability to establish and maintain healthy systems and dynamics. It enables value to be delivered across its entire supply chain, starting from within. It is a living system that flows with the changes of life, because it is built on abundance, not lack. It demonstrates the ability to imagine and create things that change reality, not reinforce it. It delivers results beyond stakeholder returns and can access capital in a variety of ways.

The evolution of leaders and teams

Leadership also looks quite different in this kind of reality. Only the outsider or renegade will be free and courageous enough to tap into the creative intelligence necessary to shift incoherent business practices.

Entrepreneurs need a specific set of qualities and skills to get their ideas off the ground — the ability to spot an opportunity, creativity, passion, energy and technical savvy to develop a solution and bring people in to get the solution to market. Then they either need to adapt to being part of the circle or team or get out of the way. Many great ideas never get realized because they cannot change their natural operating stance to collaborate, rather than drive and control.

In organizations where this challenge has been overcome, leaders must learn to create the healthy systems mentioned above, rather than vertical functions which compete with one another once it is no longer worth the effort to conquer a market. The specific qualities, skills and experience needed to be an effective organizational leader at any level or scale are highly relevant to the context in which they are working. In other words, strong foundations for everyone in an open, curious, stable inner stance are essential, then an organization must identify what its leaders need to learn, why and how. This is most effectively done with bespoke support. It is an illusion that organizations can do this alone, systems will always constrain thinking and behaviour, generally to the lowest

Teams are the seed crystals of healthy organizational systems and successful businesses. Many teams and organizations focus on the harder aspects of structure — roles, responsibilities, expectations, workflows, results. However, those approaches are all extractive and we are not machines. Instead, teams need to develop excellent communication flows, deep trust and commitment if they are going to disrupt extraction. They should focus on strengthening their collective ambition, acceptance, serenity, respect, membership, pride, camaraderie and celebration. Teams need to collaborate and co-create to deliver results, so good capacity for dialogue and working across functions are fundamental. In this way collective intelligence can be leveraged to deliver real busines value, rather than meet people’s expectations. There will also be increasing need for smaller teams to come together quickly, work on something, then move on and regroup elsewhere. This requires a different skillset again, with highly agile, resourceful people who can collaborate quickly without any of the usual supports for effective teamwork.

As team members, we can stimulate our creativity in a myriad of ways, whether it is to see life through new eyes or to do something completely original. There is no need to influence and control when we show up as trustworthy, competent and generous. We can establish alignment on business value, rather than consensus on specific ideas or approaches. We need to experiment and learn continuously, so that we are always reinventing ourselves and helping our businesses to do the same. Most of the challenges we face today are adaptive — we need to grow into them because our past approaches are not going to bring good results. We must always keep AI at the service and support of human intelligence, rather than allowing it to replace us or telling us what and how to think.

Cognitive and economic sovereignty

Let us also be crystal clear that the real disruption that is needed in every part of life is to step out of a system that extracts natural resources and labour at the cheapest possible price and concentrates wealth and power in the hands of the elite few. Disruption has become a buzzword in many organizations but what is being broken down by extraction, accelerated by the pandemic, is a destruction of the fabric of society, so that wealth and power can be concentrated more than ever. A fully digital economy risks making millions of us poorer, driven by narratives about how we need a fairer, more sustainable world, in which “You will own nothing and you will be happy” (Klaus Schwab — Chairman of the World Economic Forum, chief architect of the Great Reset).

It is paramount that we own our community physical, digital and financial assets while we are still able to do so. Decentralized, semi-decentralized, distributive, transparent, open platforms that return economic value to our local and regional communities will promote independent, diverse, innovative and resilient economies.

If we don’t choose to create our own future, someone else will choose it for us. They already are.

Join us on Thursday 21 January 2021 for our monthly call “Making sense of disruption”. See you there!