Emergence or Emergency?

I was at an event earlier this week that highlighted the crisis our planet is in: environmentally, economically and morally. Some were speaking about an Emergency, and some were linking this to the word Emergence.

I thought it was a clever and elegant to link these words. But thinking more, I realised it is tricky business.

Anyone who has gone through an organisational or personal crisis knows that times of emergency can bring enormous potential and new creative solutions. Where do these come from? Sometimes we’re not sure – they just seem to emerge.

I would define an emergency as a state of breakdown across the board, caused by changing life conditions and inadequate coping systems. The only way to find a lasting solution is to think in a new way – or, as Einstein elegantly formulated it: “You can’t solve a problem at the same level that it was caused.”

Now how often do we really solve an emergency? And how often do we just patch things up, get everything back to normal, and upgrade our security systems to make sure next time we won’t get caught so easily?

A great example is WW II. An enormous existential, developmental and moral emergency resulting in millions and millions of dead, wounded and traumatised. But the fifties were all about restoring order, wealth and ‘the old’. I recently listened to Churchill’s famous “We’ll fight them on the beaches” speech, which is a moving example of courageous leadership, and was amazed to hear him finish with the words: “And if for any reason, which I don’t believe at all, this island will get conquered, then the Empire will fight to restore the Old.”

The Old lasted until the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, burning bras and University riots. Which was the emergency, and which the emergence?

Truly new solutions, the sort of solutions that permanently solve emergencies, don’t get handed down, thought up or constructed from existing knowledge and morals; they emerge. And the only way anything new can emerge is if we have the courage to stop our current way of thinking and make space for something new to emerge in our awareness.

As human beings we are conditioned to deal effectively with emergencies. We’ve been so successful because of our ability to apply our knowledge consciously and innovate. We learn from each emergency and do better during the next one – which then of course always triggers a next one because we continuously upgrade our life conditions and therefore keep outgrowing our coping systems.

Now the thing is that this is nothing more than a sophisticated survival technique. It doesn’t bring anything fundamentally new. We are programmed to preserve the old through our very ability to learn, remember and seek stability.

This very tendency to develop pushes us from emergency to emergency. We always think that this time we will really solve it, but that’s only because we usually don’t see that our lives are a part of a vast evolutionary process. If you take a step back, you can see that we always need to innovate and the very moment we achieve stability things start going off the rails – because of that very stability, which changes the game!

Now the cases where truly new solutions are found, they usually don’t come from anyone or any place in particular. They emerge, and usually surprise us entirely. When European feudalism, the Church and robber barons had snuffed out any sense of freedom, some religious innovators moved to the “The New World” and started a revolution in democratic principles that, however eroded they may seem to us now, changed the human experience of freedom for good. When IBM was on the verge of death, the first steps on the path of its transformation into an online services giant were set in a hallway cupboard by some enterprising renegade employees fiddling around with the net.

Too often when we find ourselves in an emergency we act like a blind horse trying to use the same solution over and over again, only to find things getting worse. What if we would actually stop and let go of the one and only thing that we put our faith in: the very thinking that we get our sense of security from – and that got us into trouble to start with?

That’s a challenging thing to do – particularly when you are fighting for your survival. It takes real courage, leadership and vision. But I’m sure that we all have at least one experience in our life when taking that risk to not know the solution actually brought about a completely new solution; a solution that came out of nowhere – it simply emerged, you knew it was right, and it changed the game forever.

And I think that’s where the rub is. Linking Emergency with Emergence can be effective in the right context, but if taken superficially without questioning our values we will muddle up two concepts that tend to be opposites: Emergency arising from survival, and Emergence arising from trust.

Unless we are very conscious, extremely courageous and have a vision for what we are doing and why, when faced with an emergency we will most likely descend to survival mode – the very last place that will tempt us to let go of what we know and take a risk. Emergence needs space to arise and dedication to a purpose beyond ourselves and our very human worries.

When I look at the state of the world, the state of the environment and the state of our global economy, I feel overwhelmed. Often I try not to look at it because I feel too small to handle it. But what do you think we need: a State of Emergency, or Emergence?

The Trouble with Values

One of the most contentious issues in the melt-down of Western Capitalism is values. But I’m also finding that when talking about values, I easily end up in a muddle about what values mean – it seems that everyone has a different view.

Mostly they are looked at as objects with a clearly defined meaning. Honesty, truthfullness, care. So far, so good. But what does that mean? Honest to whom? To the public? To the Board? To the employees? To the tax man? And for what reason? Because of the law? Because of inner integrity?

I think values give us trouble, because looking at values as objective traits doesn’t work without first seeing how we operate from values as subjective structures.

Those value structures are not what we think, but how we think. We can see objectively what someone thinks, but our interpretation happens through how we think ourselves.

And there’s the catch. Without introspection and objectivity on ourselves we won’t be able to understand the values someone else filters our values through, and will end up either miscommunicating or imposing our own preferred values.

Now the times of imposing values by Royal or Papal decree is over – in our postmodern times values can’t be prescribed anymore. They have to be internalised, accepted, understood. That’s why most conventional consulting on values is rubbish.

What, rubbish? Those painstakingly crafted corporate values that we’ve carefully rolled out through all-staff breakfast meetings and put up on the walls in beautiful graphics? In a corporate climate of cold mechanistic impersonality, what could possibly be wrong with that?

Unfortunately most corporate values don’t actually touch people’s real values, as they don’t consider the interior of the human being. They don’t deal with the value structure of the individual. If applied in a top-down mechanistic way as a one-size-fits-all, they will be nothing more than the new prescribed mode of being – and nothing to do with real values.

‘Our Customers Come First’ – well what does that really mean to each employee? Is customer value really what makes a human being tick? If a manager cares first and foremost about his team, if a coffee lady lives to please her collegues with great coffee, if an environmental officer looks at the future, is that perhaps not good enough? Do we train them to smile and say the customer comes first? And do they perhaps fear a falling out and losing their job if they pursue wholeheartedly what they truly value?

You can see the trouble… how do we create values that work universally? Hanging some beautiful graphics at the entrance is not enough – values are meaningless unless deeply lived.

‘Shareholder value’ is just as much an oxymoron. If shareholder value is about money for the shareholders, the meaning of the word ‘value’ gets problematic. The values of our shareholders are expressed in the well-being of the organisation, its employees and its natural and social environment – not only now but into our grandchildren’s future. That obviously doesn’t allow for Fred the Shred hiding out in Turkey.

So you can see how ‘care’ or ‘integrity’ will look different depending on the value structure of the human being holding that value. From a purely traditional capitalist perspective care looks different than from a triple-bottom-line perspective.

The only way forward I see is if honesty, dedication, humility and respect (and I’m picking these randomly) stop being seen as soft, vague or taboo, but are the heartbeat of any organisation. Not just as fixed, objective traits, but as living, internalised expressions of what moves us – whatever corporate ranking, cultural background, education, gender or generation we filter those values through.

The one thing we all know is that when you shake someone’s hand, you can tell their values in an instant. If we pay attention, we can’t be fooled. And in a way, we can rebuild our capitalist system just based on that simple fact alone.

Why Scarcity in Abundance?

Lately I’ve been talking to veterans in leadership, organisational change and management.  And what keeps striking me is this question: Why do we believe in scarcity?

I think everyone agrees that financially things are not going well. Opinions differ but people do agree that we’re in a recession. However I don’t think that collectively we’re clear about the size, scope and cause. At all. In fact, the most frequent response I observe is automatic finger-pointing to the government.

Now particularly in Britain that’s understandable because our government has gotten on the wrong side of just about everything anybody could ever get on the wrong side of – like lemmings competing to reach the cliff. But how on earth did a democracy end up with an incapable government? Who voted those people in? And if our leaders seem so incompetent, what exactly does that say about us?

In fact, I admire them for the fact that they have the courage to stand up and be counted, where it’s easy for us to throw tomatoes.

But I think the issue is deeper. We’re not used to thinking about the culture we shape. Or even about the fact that we shape our culture. Culture seems to be something that’s just there, and never gives us what we need (or want).

So we worry, and compete to get what we think we need. Education is usually about competing with everyone else. There are vast networks of people helping each other not to cooperate, but outsmart each other. And do you ever consider why we compete so hard? What is the logic behind this? Why, if God has put us all on this beautiful earth (or whoever did) with big brains and enormous creativity, would there not be enough to do for everyone? Why would anyone be so cruel as to put more people on the planet than there is potential?

So then why did we create a culture of scarcity? If you think about it, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. It probably did some time ago, when we were hunting and gathering and depended on what was on offer. Later we started farming and depended on the weather. But now? We have developed a world that works as one mechanism, able to make use of farming, manufacturing, hunting, services, technology, you name it – and capable of inventing new ways to deal with these modes of life as we reach the limit of each.

So why still scarcity? Isn’t it time we catch up with ourselves?

If we can see that the economy failed not because of external scarcity, but because of internal greed and incompetence, why do we try to squeeze ourselves back into that same economy, doing more of the very things we know don’t work anymore, worrying that there isn’t enough opportunity for us to do the things we don’t want to be doing?

I appreciate that many people are trapped in this economy, as they didn’t receive the skills and education others did. But many people I talk to are extremely well-educated, sophisticated, creative individuals who seem to be largely unaware of this state of affairs.

If clients don’t need our traditional consulting services of recycling the same old market ideology dressed up in New 5-Step Methods anymore, what would they need to create a new culture? What do we need to offer them to adapt, transform and morph themselves into sustainable, abundant, useful hubs of cutting-edge creativity?

Do you feel the desire to liberate the abundance that’s hidden under the old Syndicate of Scarcity?