1 INTRODUCTION
The Warning Unseen
Alex fumbled with the radio dial, his eyes flicking between the road and the glowing display of his favorite station. The highway stretched out before him, the rhythm of the tires on the pavement providing a soothing backdrop to his thoughts. Lost in the music and the hypnotic blur of passing scenery, he barely registered the subtle orange glow emanating from the dashboard.
The alarm light blinked persistently, a silent plea for attention amidst the cacophony of melodies. But Alex remained oblivious, his mind occupied with plans for the evening and memories of the day’s events. He glanced at the rearview mirror, adjusting it absentmindedly, unaware of the impending danger looming just beneath the surface.
As the miles rolled by, the warning light grew more insistent, its once faint glow now pulsating with urgency. Yet, Alex remained blissfully unaware, his focus drifting further from the present moment with each passing second.
It wasn’t until the sound of screeching tires shattered the tranquility of the drive that Alex’s reverie was broken. Startled, he jerked upright, his heart racing as he realized the gravity of the situation. Through the windshield, he saw the sea of brake lights ahead, a testament to the chaos unfolding on the highway.
Panic surged within him as he slammed his foot on the brake pedal, his muscles tensing as he fought to regain control of the vehicle. The car lurched forward, skidding across the asphalt as adrenaline surged through his veins.
With a sickening thud, time seemed to freeze as the impact reverberated through the car. Metal crunched and glass shattered, the world spinning in a blur of motion and noise. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, everything fell silent.
Blinking through the haze of shock, Alex’s gaze fell upon the dashboard, where the once ignored warning light now burned bright amidst the wreckage. It was a stark reminder of the dangers of complacency, a lesson learned too late. For on the road of life, sometimes the most important signals are the ones we fail to see.
Creating awareness and collective agency to react to the signs
Like Alex, we collectively rush absentmindedly through life, and, as a society, we do not seem capable to react to some signals that are seriously worrying. We need some form of collectiv consciousnes and ability to react that is currently missing,especially at the highest levels. One may thing that he solution is in changing the leader, and bring to power someone who is more aware of the real probles and has the detrmination to take serious action. I am afraid it will not happen, actually I do not believe i makes any sense. A single person or a limited number f people just do not have the level of perception to identify and tackle the problems of a specie. Big, detailed engineerd social or poitical designs have always failed. Social organizations are emergent structures , and we will not be able to build better ones by sitting at some form of design board .
The notion of the power separation in 3 powers is driving most of the states. Montesqueu’s simple idea had more impact in shaping societies around the worls than In many cases it is just a fake, but for some reason, even dictatorial regimes feel the urge to have nominally separate legislative.
So , to achieve change, there is no need to design a new , complicated social structures, that will be fragile and brittle and will not withstand the test of time or of challenging events. We need to redefine the fabric of society , starting from ourselves and
Changing organizations
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Switch the focus from change to to the planetary limits %%
So many things have changed in the past few years : those of us who are not millennial cannot recognize the world of our childhood. I remember my parents describing their younger years before World War II. Their lives did not involve television, a telephone in every home or omnipresent cars: all elements that defined mine. Sometimes I reflect on the disconnect they have felt between the environment in which they grew up and the one in which they lived most of their adult life. Until a few years ago, I believed I had experienced fewer changes in my life than they did. I also felt that the transitions they experienced were amplified by the fact that they were born in a rural area in northern Italy and moved to live in mid to large Italian and international cities where they raise my sister and me. Having turned 60, I am now quite far from my early years, and I am not that sure anymore.
Obviously, one of the most notable changes I have witnessed is related to how we communicate and exchange information and the rate at which we do so. Technologies to process and transfer information have changed how we plan and manage our organizations. Moreover, technology’s impact is likely to accelerate further in the years ahead. In this book, I will try to reflect on some critical drivers of change within organizations. They are not necessarily restricted to innovation in information technology, but are often related to or enabled by it. I will also elaborate on some approaches that someone may find helpful to experiment with. The pace, the intensity, and the instruments of change will not be the same everywhere around the world or within all economic sectors. Every specific situation will require contextualization.
To understand the evolution of a given organization, the more important aspect to consider is the intentions of the individuals that compose it and the stakeholders that revolve around it. The approaches and techniques discussed in the following chapters will appeal to those who believe that one cannot change a system without transforming first oneself. Intentions will determine the matters toward which they will direct their attention and therefore drive the organization’s evolution. In that respect, the notion of consciousness will be one of the significant threads through most of the sections that follow. Along with Agility, Complexity and Digital Transformation, Consciousness represents one of the four petals of the peaceful Organizational Revolution unfolding before us. [1]
Why the petals and the revolution? Because significant, disruptive changes can bring positive and negative impact. If you see a young plant germinating, you cannot know if it is a weed or a beautiful flower. I hope that the approaches presented here will help create environments within our organizations where diversity, inclusivity, and performance can flourish.
Let’s start by looking at how the power of information
[1]: eertertezrtert
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1.2 Techplomacy and the demise of the nation state
If you follow the world news you will have noticed that traditional organizations and institutions are facing a decline in popularity and trust among public opinion in many countries. There is an obvious trend of political support shifting away from traditional parties, but the trend is actually deeper than a random oscillation of public opinion and is rooted in societal and epochal changes.
Take for example the concept of Nation State, born out of the American and French revolutions of the late 18th century, that over the past 200 years has been the cornerstone of the World Order and the guardian of the rule of law. On one hand the concept of Nation State seems increasingly popular worldwide with a record number of states existing on the planet, following the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia. On the other hand, globalization and digitization have created multinational actors whose economic power exceeds the one of small states. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook speaks face-to-face with the political institutions of the United States or the European community. If Google was a country, it would rank 70th in GDP (Investopedia 2015). While there are companies that are even wealthier, Google example is particularly relevant. Not only because it was created from scratch only 30 years ago, exposing the speed of change that the digital world can impose on our society, but even more because it runs a business totally digitized and globalized and therefore particularly challenging for traditional nation states to control and regulate. In the last few years the European Union adopted a new set of regulations to protect the data privacy of its citizens : none of its member Nation States would have the economic clout to impose regulation on Google or any of the mighty GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba,Microsoft).
The political relevance of global tech giants has been formalized by Denmark’s decision in 2017 to nominate (“Introducing TechPlomacy - American-Danish Business Council” 2018) a tech ambassador with the mandate “to engage in dialogue and collaboration on a broad range of topics with the tech-industry.”(Office of Denmark’s Tech Ambassador n.d.) and offices in Silicon Valley and Beijing. In the words of the ambassador himself : “In this age, a select number of highly successful multinational tech companies have become extremely influential – to the extent that their economic and political influence match or surpass that of our traditional partners, the nation-states” (Foremski 2019).
One of the most controversial aspects of the TTIP ( Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) negotiations between Europe and the US was the ‘corporate court’ system that was to allow multinational corporations and other foreign ‘investors’ to sue governments for enacting regulation which damage their profits.
The TTIP negotiations, started in 2013 and ended inconclusively in 2016, have been declared no longer relevant by a council decision in 2019 (“TTIP - The EU-US Trade Deal” n.d.), but how long will it be before GAFAM officially surge to a political level equivalent to nations?
With political clout added to Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and pervasive gadgets connected to the internet, GAFAM and their successors will wield an unchallenged power to shape our societies, and it is definitely not too soon for each of us to, as a minimum, start reflecting about the future we would like to have for us and our children.
Zuboff, S., 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.
1.3 Managing Complexity
To manage complexity, we need first to understand it, or at least define it, and understand where it comes from.
1.3.1 Do we live in a magical world?
The disruptive change brought by technology, particularly by Information Technology, impacts global issues and our personal and professional lives. We may reach the point where we perceive that the world we live in is beyond our comprehension. Indeed, until a few years ago, people were used to dealing with objects that a human being could fully comprehend. They knew that a more knowledgeable person would explain if they could not understand a tool or a process personally. A good mechanic could take apart every piece of a car and build it back: not a very productive activity, but doable. A handy person with sufficient free time could erect a home from scratch: my neighbor did. This feeling of being in control would apply to the majority of items. Like a large boat or an aeroplane, some things would be far more complex, but it would be easy to identify the team of highly trained people in charge.
Today, each of us ordinarily relies on systems beyond the comprehension of a single human being (Arbesman, 2014) . When you use a Windows-based computer, you may not realize that the code that runs it, the Operating System, consists of some 50 million lines, not counting all the programs you loaded. If you wanted to read it, let alone understand it, it would take you almost five years at one line per second for 8 hours per day, without weekends or vacations. As of September 2015, Google code amounted to 2 billion lines, 50 times more than windows.(Metz 2015). The amount of knowledge embedded in daily appliances, from watches to mobile phones or cars, is beyond the comprehension of a single individual, no matter how educated or intelligent. It is almost like living in a fairy tale: things happen almost by magic, and no one can explain it to you to the last detail. We must have faith that it will work and, apart from the occasional glitch, sometimes dramatic, it regularly does. Going back to the parallel I was drawing with my parents, here is what summarizes best the main divide across our lives: given enough time, determination, and some knowledgeable friends, they knew that they could get a grasp of almost everything they handled while I can’t possibly do so.
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In our modern society, we need an unprecedented level of trust to live our lives. If, for some reason, you lose faith in the network of experts, scientists, and engineers that design and run the systems we rely upon daily, your whole life loses its foundations. A reasonably skeptical person needs a solid education in science to understand and trust the processes behind generating the knowledge our lives rely upon: the scientific method relies heavily upon healthy skepticism. On the other hand, extreme skepticism without a solid technical and scientific background is dangerous and can be life-threatening for some. In February 2020, “Mad” Mike Hughes, 64, died when he crash-landed his steam-powered rocket (BBC News 2020): like many flat-earthers, Hughes could not trust centuries of scientific research and hoped to prove his theory by going to space. Conspiracy theorists of all sorts similarly put their lives and our ordinary social and political stability at risk every day.
Is the apparent magical essence of our world the reason fake news is so popular these days? Since one lives surrounded by what appears to be magic, it is hard to separate truth from fake. If everything is possible and happens by “magic” anyway, it is easy to fall deeply into the natural human tendency to believe in what one likes to be true. Moreover, if everything is possible and beyond comprehension, how can we distinguish a reliable expert from a wizard. The simplest thing is to believe the one who tells the story we like. Modern technology also accelerates this reinforcement of bad ideas; with a few clicks on the internet, we can easily find people who share our thoughts. Even more, the search algorithms will keep feeding us with the reinforcing message that like-minded people and organizations surround us. Maybe this explains the recent rise of populism and a strong argument for a dramatic increase in education and particularly science education worldwide, but this is another story.
Some healthy scepticism may indeed be helpful to make sense of our complex world. Complicated systems are reliable only if they are exact. We have seen that even a simple modification can turn a stable, easily predictable system into a complex one prone to chaotic behaviour. We live with the assumption that our world is fully described by advanced economic and intricate financial systems, like a perfect mechanical clock. We assume a mechanistic world-view inspired by the scientific and technical advances that made possible the First Industrial Revolution. Yet, the speed at which transactions run, the reaction loops between multiple actors interconnected through ever more complex systems may result in totally unexpected results. The 2008 financial crisis was primarily caused by ignoring the emerging effect of interrelated financial instruments under the illusion that the system was foolproof.
We may have reached a level of complexity where our assumption of the world being like a mechanical clock does not provide us with sufficient precision to avoid chaos.
Our magic tricks may increasingly fail us. The climate crisis is a dramatic example of the consequences of ignoring the complexity of a system while trying to maximize just one parameter, in this case, production and wealth. A more comprehensive world-view is necessary to tackle the complexity that surrounds us.
#idea Technology is not going to save u from the climate crisis, bit technology is essential to understand and model our world in order to find solutions, which may be only partially technologically. Social innovation may play a key role
1.3.2 How complex is your world ?
“Things are not how they used to be when I was young!”. We probably heard elders complain that the world around them changed so much that they struggle to figure it out. Facing relentless social and technological change, we may have a similar feeling ourselves. In the managerial world in particular, the current managerial generation believes it’s facing unprecedented challenges. A new term emerged a few years ago to qualify the present exceptional world: VUCA , (Volatile, Unstable, Complex and Ambiguous). However, no one can claim that a RIPO (Reliable, Immovable, Plain, Obvious ) world ever existed either.
In fact, management discourse has been describing the “present” as particularly challenging, especially when confronted with a presumptively stable past, and opening the way to impending unprecedented changes for a long time now. In “Beyond the hype: rediscovering the essence of management” [(Eccles 1992] 1992, 20) Eccles pointed out that the mantra of the exceptional present has been sung at least since the early 1950s.
Maybe this is the reflection of humanity’s difficulty in adapting to the unrelenting technological changes it had to face since the invention of the wheel. One would imagine we got used to changing since a long time, and that by now an ever-changing world should be considered normal rather than exceptional. Or maybe it’s a smart negotiating position, to justify increasing managerial salaries because running a business in an exceptionally complex world requires unprecedented and scarce skills. Managing a modern corporation must indeed be the realm of pure geniuses since the annual compensation of the average S&P 500 CEO has grown to more than twice the money bestowed every year in recognition of their achievements on all the Nobel Prize winners. The extravagant pay of the world top CEO’s is another subject, and we will drop it.
Some believe that there is some truth in the statement and claim we are approaching a singularity in the history of humankind. Is the networked society, with new information technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain bringing to life the managerial revolution that has been announced since the middle of last century?
1.3.3 Understanding the complexity of our world
The previous section was about the difference between what is complicated and what is complex. Creating complications is, by definition, a difficult task, as in the case with a high precision mechanical watch. On the other hand, complexity can be generated swiftly, like cooking a dish of spaghetti or appending a second pendulum to an existing one. This does not mean that a complicated system is always predictable: especially in social interactions, intricated rules can easily result in contradictory consequences. Complexity, or chaos, occurs when very different outcomes happen in response to minor differences of a starting point. It’s the base of many gambling games: it is practically impossible to control the result of throwing dice or spinning the wheel of roulette.
Complexity and chaos emerge naturally from the web of relations of our lives. Gazing at my web of connections, friends, family, and professional ties, I see something that looks much more like a dish of spaghetti than a precise clock. To keep our lives manageable, though, we need stability and predictability. Most social constructs are built to satisfy this need to provide order and security. This results in elaborate organizations that aim at structuring our lives in predictable ways: governments, churches, armies, educational systems, tax systems etc.. The world-view behind the design of our economic and social system is built upon a mechanistic understanding of nature. An approach rooted in the great discoveries of classical physics, starting from the fundamental laws of Newton that offered an explanation to the most diverse phenomena in the universe, from an apple falling to the ground to remote planets orbiting around the sun. In this world-view, social relations and economics are explained as rational agents interacting to increase their utility. Organizations today, small and large, are designed as logical, regulated contraptions. Experts are sitting at the top to control the system through a carefully engineered chain of command. Yet, the very complication of our social constructs makes them fragile and prone to failure when confronted with the unexpected. Consider the collapse of the financial system during the subprime crisis or the debacle of the American and Nato armies in Afghanistan facing the Taliban.
Until a few years ago, we lived in a world where we had to deal with a clear and stable set of actors, unquestionably identified and well separated from each other. Take the telephone: It was common to have one telephone line per family when I was a kid. Moreover, telephone and communication suppliers were basically one and the same. Today, in developed countries, we own multiple lines, several mobiles within the family, each associated with its own subscription plan and giving access to additional channels like WhatsApp or Telegram. At the global level also things have been growing more convoluted. Nation-states used to have clear boundaries of their power. Those boundaries were occasionally crossed in war, but the state of war itself was clearly defined. Today nations interact in many, sometimes incoherent, bilateral and multilateral ways. Even war is not what it used to be. International conflicts are muddled by terrorism, cyber warfare or the weaponisation of migrants as experienced at the borders of the European Union. This is not to say today we are worse or better than in the past. The point is that the variety of players, at the global, social, and personal level and the interaction channels have increased dramatically. No matter how much we like to build a society that looks like a mechanical clock, reality increasingly looks like an entangled dish of spaghetti.
If you feel overwhelmed, you may find comfort in the knowledge that you are not alone. In the ’80s, at the end of the Cold War, US Army strategists had to face the disappearance of their traditional enemies. They described the new strategic situation as volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous: VUCA. The expression “VUCA world” was adopted by management consultants, speakers, thinkers, and writers worldwide. While the VUCA acronym was specific to the post-Cold War period, the feeling is recurrent. Since the fifties, management literature consistently described the “present” as more difficult to manage than the past! Maybe we should conclude that change is pervasive in modern society, and we would be wise to accept and get accustomed to it. International crises and catastrophic events where one has to make quick decisions based on minimal and uncertain information are not new. Still, until the end of the Cold War, the strategic environment was relatively simple: the bad guys and the good guys were clearly identified. Whichever side you were on, you would have a definite vision of the good ( “you” and your friends) and the bad guys ( them and their friends). Since then, the number of actors has been growing dramatically. Multiple actors with various relationships make for a growing and changing number of connections. Understanding the environment becomes increasingly difficult as each player may shift its strategic focus and alliances form and dissolve continuously.
Does this mean there is no chance that our world will rise to the challenges it faces, particularly the climate emergency? Not necessarily, but, as shown in Glasgow’s COP 26, we should not rely on world bosses, political or corporate, to adopt the required long-term perspective. The former bet their careers on the upcoming electoral results and the latter on next quarter financial reports. Neither have the mind frame to tackle systemic issues that span decades ahead but require immediate action. Blaming those currently holding economic and political power is undoubtedly justified, but we should probably also look at ourselves. Maybe we should recognise that we are all part of the problem and therefore of the solution, and we can try to reinvent our lives.
To make sense of this complex world, maybe we need to adopt a world-view where agents are not so clearly separate from each other. They are entangled, and their boundaries are fuzzy: effects emerge in a non-linear way and are not predictable.
Even in a classical approach, you cannot predict the behaviour of a system simply from the behaviour of its parts. Take Sodium ( Chemical symbol: Na) and Chlorine (Cl) for example. Sodium is a volatile metal. As a high school student, one of my favourite pranks was to throw Sodium pieces in a puddle of water in front of a schoolmate. The Sodium would immediately react with water, inflame and explode, scaring the hell out of my victims. In minimal quantities, Chlorine can be used as a disinfectant or as a way to sanitize water and can also be found in the form of highly poisonous gas. I swear that, as opposed to a former President of the United States, I have never inflicted Chlorine-based prank on anyone. You would not consider pouring liberal quantities of Sodium or Chlorine in your mouth, right? We actually do it every time we sprinkle salt on our plates since culinary salt is the chemical composition of Sodium and Chlorine (NaCl). The exuberant and harmful properties of the parts transform into harmless, beneficial and actually tasteful properties of the system. Chemistry also offers plenty of opposite examples of harmless components that result in violent reactions when combined.
The world view inspired by classical physics cannot help us understand world trends emerging from the non-linear interactions of multiple agents. We need a more subtle worldview than picturing human beings as mechanical cogs in a piece of predictable machinery. Here, however, we walk a fine line. We say that anything is possible, and science cannot guarantee reliable predictions. In the case of climate science, for example, scientists do not offer firm estimates. They provide scenarios and probabilities of outcomes. When confronted with a confusing set of options and possibilities, one may be tempted to assume that everybody’s guess is just as good as solid scientific research. I suspect this reasoning is behind the dismissal of scientific opinion that is becoming common in the public debate. It also provides a fertile ground for all sorts of conspiracy theories or denials of evidence, from anti-vaxers to climate sceptics. In reality, science is well equipped to address complexity and chaos: it’s just not the science that was the base of the mechanical representation of the universe. The traditional worldview was inspired by classical physics. We will see how modern concepts like quantum physics can inspire a new worldview more fitting to understand current complexity.
1.3.4 Living in an exponential world
It only took a few years for the most successful internet-based companies like Google or Facebook to reach the summit of economic power. These companies have revolutionized how people interact with information, growing larger and larger every year. In 2022 three of the top 10 companies by market capitalization were initially born with the internet boom: Alphabet (Google), Amazon and Meta (Facebook). New companies such as Uber or Airbnb have penetrated established markets as new entrants, quickly disrupting older businesses. The speed at which they grew illustrates the impact of the knowledge economy on how we conduct our lives and the acceleration of societal change we face. Is there some limit to the change we can expect in the future, or should we anticipate seeing relenting disruption forever?
When you drive your car and step on the gas pedal, the speed increases until, eventually, the engine cannot keep up delivering more power. Assuming that you do not crash or are pulled over by a policeman, you reach a maximum speed you cannot exceed further. On the contrary, some phenomena around us appear to grow forever, or at least for a sufficiently long time that one cannot control them anymore. We call this behaviour exponential.
Unfortunately, most of us are not well prepared to understand and deal with exponential phenomena. Our understanding of the world is often based on a mechanical perspective, where exponential phenomena are very limited. A mechanism, like the car engine mentioned before, usually can sustain acceleration only for a limited time before some limiting factor kicks in. On the other hand, a complex system consisting of a web of feedback loops interacting with each other can display a behaviour that is not easily predictable. In particular, exponential behaviour can arise when a reinforcing feedback loop is not balanced by a corresponding limiting factor.
An old story illustrates how easily one can get fooled by something presenting an exponential pattern. Once upon a time, a sovereign longing for distraction launched a contest to invent the most entertaining game. A wise person introduced the game of chess and captivated everyone through eloquence and wit. By explaining the rules and strategies in a way everyone could understand, she triumphed in the competition. The king was so enthusiastic about this new game that he allowed the winner to name her prize. The sage simply asked for rice: one grain for the first square of the chessboard, two grains for the second, four for the third, and so on, doubling the grains for each of the 64 slots. The king thought the request was ridiculously modest at first until he realized that all the kingdom’s rice would not be enough to satisfy it. He realized that he would have to ask for more rice, which would cause the people to riot and overthrow him. The story does not end well for the sage, but that is not the point.
Phenomena that display exponential behaviour can be tricky to control. At each step, daily, weekly or yearly, some value grows proportionally to the value of the previous step. One may initially be relaxed, under the impression that the situation is under control and there is still time to take more drastic actions should the need arise. Unfortunately, mitigating measures take time before achieving an impact, and the phenomenon may get out of hand.
A quiz illustrates the power of exponential behaviour. Consider a pond where a lily pad grows, doubling its size daily. If the lily pad takes an entire month, say September, to cover half of the pond, when will it cover the whole pond? It is trivial, but still oddly surprising, to realize that the pond will be fully covered on October first.
The COVID pandemic is a typical example of exponential behaviour, with infections initially growing at an apparently controllable rate but suddenly overwhelming national health systems. Like the ancient king, many politicians in power couldn’t grasp the implication of an exponential event and mostly failed to take the emergency seriously and decide promptly on the necessary measures. Reacting just a few weeks sooner would not have stopped the pandemic, but it could possibly have saved thousands of lives. Eventually, in a finite environment, exponential trends always encounter a limiting factor. Even the most contagious virus stops growing once a significant fraction of the population is infected.
1.3.5 Is exponential growth a good idea?
In the previous section, I mentioned pandemics as a typical example of a phenomenon showing exponential behaviour. The monetary value of final goods and services produced yearly on our planet, the World’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), also displays exponential behaviour. The figure below shows World GDP over the last 2 millennia. Historical values were negligible until the First Industrial Revolution compared to today’s level. Over the last few decades, World GDP values have skyrocketed off the chart. This happened because all governments aim to maintain a steady increase in the economy, resulting in a non-negligible annual percentage growth of GDP. In advanced economies, this results in a gain of 1 or 2 per cent annually. If the per cent growth is somewhat constant, the increase in absolute terms every year is a bit larger than the previous one. We have a reinforcing feedback loop: the more significant the economy, the faster it grows in absolute terms.
In most systems, there is some limiting factor that eventually slows or halts the exponential growth of some elements. In some cases, the limitation is smooth; in others is due to something breaking down. Epidemics stop growing once a sufficiently large fraction of the population is infected; Lilypads stop expanding in a pond once the whole surface is covered; the king stops delivering growing amounts of rice to the inventor of the chess game once the kingdom runs out of rice; your car will stop accelerating once the engine reaches its maximum power, or you find yourself in a ditch. For some reason, our economic system is designed on the assumption that there is no limiting factor to economic growth and that GDP can increase at a substantial rate forever. Governments that do not deliver some economic growth for a while lose their job. This has worked fine so far as long as the impact of human activities on environmental resources is bearable. It’s changing.
Of course, wealth and development have brought enormous human benefits, and one would not compare them to viruses. Thanks to economic development, literacy rates, good health, and life expectancy have never been so high. The problem we are increasingly faced with is that GDP growth demands equivalent growth in energy production. The fossil-based energy mix used throughout the industrial revolutions generated growing greenhouse gas emissions, particularly C02. Excessive CO2 density in the atmosphere causes the earth’s surface temperature to rise. This will eventually provide the negative feedback reaction that will prevent unlimited growth, even before we run out of fossil fuels. If nothing is done, the earth’s system will respond by becoming unliveable for the human specie.
Interestingly, the link between the concentration of CO2 ( Carbon Dioxide) and the temperature of the earth’s surface has been known since 1896, thanks to Eunice Foote, an American scientist and women’s rights campaigner(Dee 2021). The Swedish scientist Arrhenius then calculated that the human emissions of CO2 would eventually lead to global warming, connecting the final dots between economic growth and climate change(Wikipedia contributors 2021). He was wrong in his estimation that it would take centuries to reach noticeable warming. He could not foresee the exponential behaviour of global economic development.
The disturbing character of exponential trends is that you must anticipate and act when their impact still looks negligible to control them. In most cases, if you wait for this type of problem to be prominent before addressing it vigorously, it may be too late. Indeed, scientists and numerous activists started raising danger flags concerning the earth’s climate a few decades ago. On March 21st 1994, the UNFCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) was adopted to prevent “dangerous” human interference with the climate system (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and Dowson 2019). Countries that signed the Convention gather in the famous COPs ( Conference of the Parties) yearly to assess progress. 26 years after the first COP, world countries have thoroughly failed to curb the GHG emissions that are a direct consequence of the exponential economic growth driving our economies. Political and corporate bosses are as overwhelmed by exponential economic development and related GHG emission as they were by the exponential spread of COVID-19. In this case, the long-term consequences of lack of action will be even slower to show up but will trigger way more devastating consequences.
It’s easy to blame the world powers that be, but I suspect most of us would not perform much better if we were in command. After all, the mechanistic worldview that worked so well to create the production and consumption society we live in is deeply ingrained in our institutions and how we live, work and structure our organizations. A mechanic-based worldview is not suited to capture the dynamics of exponential phenomena emerging in a complex web of interconnected actors. We need new approaches to understand the complexity around us and let new, innovative solutions emerge.
A new approach is needed to understand the surrounding complexity. A good start is to realize how deeply the mechanic-based approach is reductionist and deterministic. It builds upon the assumption that we can understand the behaviour of a system by breaking it down into its elementary parts, which are assumed to follow simple rules. The system’s behaviour is then considered a mere consequence of simple interactions between its elements, ignoring the complexity of the feedback loops. Only a holistic approach will help us understand the system’s complexity and manage our companies, careers, and lives while solving our planet’s challenges.
On the contrary, the systems thinking approach proposed by Peter Senge in his book “The Fifth Discipline” is a framework that helps us account for the interconnectedness of our world. Systems thinking helps us see how things influence each other as a whole. In systems thinking, identifying key feedback loops allows us to see how a change in one part of a system can affect other parts. This approach can help us see the unintended consequences of our actions and find new solutions to problems. System thinking can be applied at the individual, organizational and global levels.
I am still looking for an out-of-the-box solution to address what I described before; actually, hoping to identify trivial solutions to today’s problem is probably delusional. It may even create additional issues, especially if the solution proposed is based on the same mindset responsible for the emergence of the problem. All this must change: in particular, organizational structures must evolve to adapt to a society where constant growth cannot be the central imperative anymore. An isolated commercial company, however, cannot ignore the competitive environment: forfeiting the growth and profit race would likely mean bankruptcy. Does this mean that we all have to wait for a global change of the legal framework with rules that impose the same environmental constraints equitably to all economic players? We have learned from the outcomes of the past 27 COPs that this will likely result in an unlivable planet. The path lies in the middle, with each organization searching for its best approach. In the following chapters, I will dive more deeply into areas I believe organizations can explore to set their own course to contribute to a healthy planet for a striving humanity.
On the contrary, the systems thinking approach proposed by Peter Senge in his book “The Fifth Discipline”, is a framework that helps us account for the interconnectedness of the world we live in. Systems thinking helps us see how things influence each other as a whole. In systems thinking, feedback loops allow us to see how a change in one part of a system can affect other parts. This approach can help us see the unintended consequences of our actions and find new solutions to problems. System thinking can be applied at the individual, organizational and global levels.
Undoubtedly, it will not be possible to address humankind’s challenges without resorting to technology. Still, I am convinced that while we cannot ignore it, we must complement technology with consciousness, collective intelligence and agility. This holistic approach will help us understand the system’s complexity and manage our companies, careers, and lives while solving our planet’s challenges. In the following chapters, I will dive more deeply into outlining the elements of this approach.
1.4 Brief Overview of the four petals
” Getting to zero will be the hardest thing people have ever done, “ once claimed Bill Gates, reflecting on how to quickly achieve net-zero GHG emissions. (Gates 2021a). Gates says that the large amounts of money available for green development should be used to speed up the innovation cycle and encourage technologies like green steel and fuels for aeroplanes that don’t harm the environment. Only through creativity, he argues (Gates 2021b), can the world achieve its goal of reducing annual net greenhouse gas emissions from around 51 billion metric tonnes to zero by 2050.
Obviously, we need to develop new eco-friendly technologies in order to build an economy that doesn’t release any emissions that are bad for the environment. However, placing all our eggs in the technology basket may delay the introduction of low-tech solutions that “only” call for a shift in perspective and priorities and would be immediately applicable. (Allwood 2021a; Rau, Toker, and Howard 2010) (McLaren and Markusson 2020)(Sutoris 2021; Allwood 2021b.) When trying to solve the issue of climate change through technological means, we risk ignoring the complexities of our ecosystem. In addition, we may disregard the fact that climate change is only one of the many issues caused by the depletion of natural resources. In fact, the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University has recognised a total of eight natural limits, and climate change is one of them. The eight planetary boundaries establish a secure zone for human activity, as determined by the biophysical processes that underpin the stability of the Earth system. (Rockström et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2015). Science and technology will be important if we want to understand and solve the systemic problems that have caused us to cross several planetary boundaries. But it would be naive to imagine that technology will deliver solutions that will keep us from having to change our way of life and our values. Such truly sustainable solutions can only be found once the complexity of the ecosystem is acknowledged and must come from the combined knowledge of people from many different places and walks of life.
The geopolitical conflict between developed countries, which are responsible for most of the past carbon emissions, and developing countries, which are responsible for most of the current and future carbon emissions, hides a big social divide in carbon emissions. The richest 1% of people on the planet, no matter where they live, are responsible for as many greenhouse gas emissions as the poorest 3.1 billion people (Oxfam 2020a). If achieving success is linked to amassing material possessions and leading an energy-intensive lifestyle, it will be difficult to limit global greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting temperature rise. In this sense, celebrities have a unique obligation to set standards, as “wealthy people set the tone on consumption to which everyone aspires.” (Halina Szejnwald Brown, professor emerita of environmental science and policy at Clark University , quoted in Paddison n.d.).
Only limited evidence exists that even those advocating for climate action take robust personal action on mitigation (Gössling 2019). On the contrary, celebrities enjoy and promote a high-emission lifestyle. By travelling in 2017, Bill Gates produced the same GHG emissions as more than 100 regular Americans. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that he supports technical solutions to the problem of climate change because they would allow him to maintain the luxurious lifestyle he already enjoys.
Our current economic model has enabled catastrophic climate change and equally catastrophic inequality, said former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (quoted in Oxfam 2020b). We can’t rely only on advanced technology alone to ensure the long-term viability of our society in the face of climate change. We need to take a more holistic approach. We need new approaches to arranging our businesses, jobs, and lifestyles. In particular, it requires a sense of social responsibility and collective action, as well as a consciousness of the impact of the way we produce and consume on the world around us. The good news is that some of the tools required to put this change in motion are already available, both at the personal and organisational levels. All we need to do is experiment with them, put them together, and ignite a small revolution in how we live and work. The Swiss association Negawatt, for example, estimates that a strategy of sobriety and efficiency can reduce Switzerland’s energy needs in 2050 by 40% compared to the official government scenario. This would make a zero-emission economy much more achievable (Moreau D., Ravalet E., Principi F 2021). Negawatt’s approach is not based on high-tech innovation but on social innovation. It advocates simple measures such as lowering home temperatures by 2°C, shortening shower times, riding bicycles more often, and making better use of living spaces.
Even though Negawatt’s ideas are easy to understand and fit with a lifestyle of plenty, they are too radical to be widely adopted quickly. The problem is that time is limited. At a banquet for Commonwealth Foreign Ministers in 2019, the Prince of Wales, now King Charles, stated that the following 18 months will “decide our capacity to reduce climate change to survivable levels and to return nature to the equilibrium we require for our survival.” (McGrath 2019). That window of opportunity has closed, and the global economy in the year 2021 has established a new high consumption level for coal, the most polluting source of greenhouse gases. When time is of the essence, one should concentrate their efforts on activities that will yield results rapidly, such as improving themselves or the organisations they are in a position to directly influence. This strategy, despite how simplistic or naive it may sound, is in fact founded on the knowledge that has been passed down through the ages. It was once said by a Sufi poet that lived in the 13th century:
In this book, I will concentrate mainly on the changes that we may implement to the way we work; that is why I like to speak of the Organizational Revolution. Organisational structures need to transform radically in response to the change that has already taken place and as a tool to trigger the change the world needs. On the other hand, as was stated earlier, it is difficult to change the systems that surround us if we do not change ourselves first. The majority of the tools that are discussed in this book encourage and necessitate both personal and organisational change, and these two types of shifts reinforce one another.
Even if we limit our efforts to the part of the world that is closest to us, setting out on a journey with the goal of changing the whole world can feel like an impossible task. It’s clear that the CEO of a small or medium-sized business (SME) will find it easier to start a change process that will make her company more competitive while staying true to her values. On the other hand, a person in a position of power may find it harder to change because of the responsibilities of management, the isolation that comes with being the boss, and the fact that being in a position of power naturally boosts the ego. In any case, even if one is not at the top of the hierarchical ladder, there are ways to make an impact. One can always choose to work for an organisation that embraces the need to change itself to change the world. Attracting talents that expect to work for organisations serious about their social and environmental responsibility is a significant driver of change, even in major corporations.
Already, technology, and in particular information technology, is bringing about fundamental shifts in the ways in which we carry out our work. Let’s pretend for a moment that we want the digital transition to do more than just increase output while lowering costs. The next step could then be to make use of technology in order to gain an understanding of the ways in which our organisation engages with the external environment. At the same time, in a world that is changing at a rapid rate, organisations need to become more responsive by adopting agile working methods and relying more on collective intelligence than the traditional command and control structure.
I like to summarise the aspects of change using something I call “the four petals of the organisational revolution,” which are as follows:
- The transition to digital: it is impossible to solve any of the issues that face our modern society without relying on information technology.
- Consciousness
- Complexity
- Co-responsible leadership
The four petals are deeply connected to one another, and elucidating the connections between them will help us imagine the organisational change that we may want to infuse into our organisations in the coming years. A better understanding of the four petals will be beneficial if we are to leverage organisational change to cause even more significant societal change.
The following sections covers a brief introduction to each of the 4 petals that will be then discussed more in depth in separate chapters. We will see how these four petals interact to impact the way companies are structured and are managed as a way to make sense of today’s complex world. The complexity of the situation is rooted in the fact that all four elements are interconnecte
1.4.1 About consciousness
I occasionally get the impression that the world is filled with ruthless people motivated by a desire for wealth and power. There is undoubtedly a greater concentration of wealth than ever before: the world’s 2153 billionaires own as much as the 4.6 billion poorest people (“Time to Care | Oxfam International” 2020). The COVID pandemic created nine more billionaires, providing them with enough money to vaccinate everyone in the world who cannot afford it. The fact that some of those billionaires eventually devote part of their wealth to charities is clearly a commendable way to give back to society. Still, it does not address the absurdity of a system that allows such extreme imbalance. Also, in the past few years, we have witnessed unbearable race and religious horror in many parts of the world. Even in rich economies, the clock has been ticking backwards, with the growth of populism has set social and political agendas backwards in several countries.
Looking at the bigger picture, though, things are not that bad. Death by war, as a percentage of world population, has decreased steadily since World War II and is actually at an historic low (Beauchamp 2015). Europe, under the auspices of the European Union, has experienced the longest war-free period within its members since the Pax Romana. Moreover, the last few decades witnessed the emergence of a grassroots movement fuelled by the growing feeling of belonging to the same world and sharing the responsibility for protecting it for the benefit of future generations. The rise of civil society since the 1980’s has materialized in the boom of the NGO sector (Lewis 2010; Beloe and Elkington, n.d.; Paul n.d.).
A growing number of people around the world are developing a more profound awareness of how individual and collective actions impact the world in which we live at many levels. This is reflected in many ways, from consumer choices to corporate commitments towards diversity and social and environmental responsibility. While often, businesses only pay lip service to issues beyond maximizing shareholders returns, the trend is real and is having a tangible impact. In a leap of optimism, I am willing to hope that the rise of populism, intolerance and fundamentalism are a form of last ditch resistance of old mind frames to the ineluctable progress of humankind and the shared consciousness that needs to drive our actions in the coming years.
In opposition to this notion of consciousness in our actions, classical economic theory tends to exonerate us from assuming responsibility for the consequences of our decisions. As rational economic actors, we are supposed to optimize our utility and trust the market’s natural tendency to achieve optimum equilibrium and maximize well-being for all.
Consciousness, rather than individual or corporate utility maximization, can be a driver of our organizations, and can open the way to a different way of life. Already major corrections are being implemented to tame the effects of a pure market drive economy like Ethical finance is or carbon pricing.
1.4.2 About the digital transition
Digital transition impacts not only the production of goods or the delivery of services but the way we work, how we interact with our colleagues, how we relate to the companies we work for and also the way we make decisions and the way companies and organizations are structured. Innovation in the digital world is constant and difficult to forecast. It is not easy to single out specific technologies that may play a predominant role in the future. In our area of interest, we can, however, identify technological themes that are likely to play a particularly interesting role in transforming the workplace in terms of organizational processes and governance. In some cases, they will also be the starting point of reflections that resonate particularly well with the need to redefine our world-view. The topics that we will explore in more detail in chapter 3 are :
- artificial intelligence
- blockchain
- quantum computing
The choice of the three subjects may sound arbitrary. Many other important technological trends are ongoing,like, to mention just a few , robots, virtual reality or the internet of thing. I like to single out those because not only they are relevant to the digitization of our world , but they 3 directly relate to the other 3 petals. Artificial intelligence forces us to think deeply about consciousness, blockchain allows the creation a vast distributed non hierarchical organizations and quantum computing offers us a worldview that can help go beyond linear thinking.
The key point that needs to be considered is if technology, and in particular information technology will be used to regenerate and grow our spirit, or it will be used as an extractive technology at the heart of Universe/surveillance capitalism.
1.4.3 About agility co-responsibility-self organization
Faced with the increased pace of societal transformation, companies need to find new, more efficient ways to respond to external inputs and rapid changes in the market. This also means redesigning the way organizations are structured, inventing new approaches to devising business models , strategies and governance processes that build upon the internal collective intelligence and are inclusive of all stakeholders.
We are witnessing an acceleration of a trend that has been taking place for a long time of reducing managerial layers. A growing number of enterprises look for inspiration in the agile approach, initially born in the software industry. Agility promotes new, flexible ways to involve customers and employees in the design and delivery of innovative products and services. Some pioneering organizations push this even further. They promote the creation of entirely new organizational forms that, in the most radical approach, replace the classical command and control hierarchical chain with ground-up managerial methods.
Today’s organizations have a fine line to walk between tapping into the richness of the collective intelligence and the flexibility of the collaborative economy. The challenge will be to create work environments that are respectful of workers that are increasingly independent and disconnected, while remaining conducive to personal fulfilment rather than exploitation.
1.4.4 About complexity
Technology allows us to work more efficiently and be more productive as individuals. Furthermore, it promotes collaboration within teams, organizations, and across distances. The lockdown created by the COVID-19 pandemic has lifted many doubts over remote working, forcing many to realize it is a viable alternative to office commute. This, in turn, is likely to boost the collaborative economy and all applications that rely extensively on peer exchange and specifically on collective intelligence. As mentioned before, the collaborative and shared economy can effectively contribute to decarbonizing strategy.
From the organizational perspective, complexity can have an external and internal feature. Externally, an organization has to interact with an ever-changing network of actors. Linear thinking is not appropriate to adaptive strategies that work well in a multisatkeholders environment. New ways to map the social and economic environment are needed
Complexity can also be seen ar the source for the emergence of collective intelligence. The notion of collective intelligence, sometimes referred to as the wisdom of the crowd, can be traced back to Condorcet and his jury theorem. Condorcet’s considered a group of people that needs to vote on a given issue assuming that each individual member of the group is more likely than not to make the right decision. He realized that the probability that the vote results in the right choice grows with the number of participants in the group. (Wikipedia contributors 2020). This can be the base of many collaborative applications in today’s economy. For example, you can plan your holiday using a guide compiled by a knowledgeable expert , or rely on the wisdom of the crowd and follow the recommendation of fellow tourists in TripAdvisor.
Forms of shared control and feedback relying on collective opinion are the backbone of the collaborative or peer to peer economy. This may take the form of crowdsourcing, where disconnected individuals participate in the same project through platforms that allow extended collaboration and in general, is at the origin of new flexible ways of working. A whole economy, sometimes also called the Shared Economy, is being developed around the notion of shared information. This model is gaining importance every day and is challenging established economic sectors like Uber for highly regulated taxi services or Airbnb for the established hospitality sector. These models are at the same time responding to the modern need for efficiency and flexibility while promoting the sharing of resources, an essential tool in a more sustainable economy. However, not everything is rosy with the collaborative economy. A disturbing aspect emerges when anonymous workers end up working for large dehumanized organizations, without the social protection granted to classical employees. This is sometimes referred to as the “uberization” of the economy.
Another disturbing side of the wisdom of the crowd is represented by the phenomenon of fake news spreading in an uncontrolled way even for the most absurd conspiracy theories like chemical trails or flat earth.