A Tentative Manifesto for the Future of Organizations — 5
What if organizations were nurtured to grow and thrive... like the living root bridges
Introduction
The living bridges of Meghalaya were grown, not built. Ficus elastica, a species in the fig genus, has aerated roots that can be tied, twisted, and shaped into bridge-like structures. But the process of growing a living root bridge is neither short nor simple. It takes 10 to 30 years before the tree’s roots resemble a bridge. Once the bridge is formed, however, it can live for centuries and be sturdy enough to hold upwards of 35 people at once, according to National Geographic.
I imagine Wayfinders to be living bridges — nurtured and nourished, guided and stewarded into becoming the path for organizations and societies to move into wholeness. They are the connectors that span the chasm between civilizations — one dying and the other painfully being born. Such organizations become imaginal cells of the future. Of imaginal cells, Rebecca Solnit writes in the Guardian article:
May the best among us, the most visionary, the most inclusive, be the imaginal cells — for now we are in the soup. The outcome of disasters is not foreordained. It’s a conflict, one that takes place while things that were frozen, solid and locked up have become open and fluid — full of both the best and worst possibilities. We are both becalmed and in a state of profound change.
This was written in the context of the pandemic, which heralded a great Pause bringing to a juddering halt the seemingly inexorable economic machine of modernity. Nonetheless, these lines are utterly relevant today as we collectively experience the collapse around us. Wayfinders can become portals to different futures, and imagine anew even as the world around us become unmoored — presaging collapse and yet, pregnant with possibilities. We grieve for much that is lost, and for what we cannot save. But like Adrienne Rich, I cast my lot, perversely, with those dreaming of reconstituting our world.
My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” ~Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977
We are at a pivotal juncture in the history of organizations. Organizations have always been shaped by social, technological, and economic forces. The Industrial Era gave rise to certain kinds of organizations with their assembly lines; the Digital Era further enhanced and modified it; and now we are in the Age of Machine Learning and AI where the very nature of work itself is on the verge of dramatic change.
A brief detour
The world, in spite of the dire warnings from tech gurus, is awash with all kinds of AI developments accompanied by fantastic predictions. I asked AI to list a few possible repercussions of ‘AI on the future of work’. The list below is completely AI generated.
AI and the Future of Work
AI will automate many jobs, leading to displacement of human workers in certain industries.
AI will create new job opportunities in fields such as data science, machine learning, and AI development.
AI may lead to a shift in the balance of power between workers and employers, as AI can perform certain tasks more efficiently and accurately than humans.
AI may lead to the creation of new types of jobs that involve working alongside AI systems to enhance productivity and efficiency.
AI may increase the demand for workers with strong critical thinking, creativity, and emotional intelligence skills, which cannot be easily replicated by machines.
AI may lead to a reduction in the number of low-skill jobs, as these can be easily automated, and an increase in high-skill jobs that require complex problem-solving and decision-making.
AI may lead to changes in the nature of work, with more emphasis on remote work, flexible work arrangements, and gig work.
AI may lead to greater income inequality, as those with the skills to work with AI and develop AI systems will be in high demand and command higher salaries.
AI may lead to the need for workers to continually reskill and upskill in order to remain employable in a rapidly changing job market.
AI may lead to greater job satisfaction, as workers are freed from tedious, repetitive tasks and can focus on more meaningful, creative work.
AI is going to change the world of work and business irreversibly, whether we like it or not. Given the underlying narrative driving their development and the content they are likely being trained on, the current paradigms of profit, power, and privilege, and myriad other soul-destroying and civilization-exterminating patterns will be exacerbated with AI. Organizations that truly wish to become Wayfinders would do well to ask themselves at this juncture:
“Why do we exist?” “What is our work?” “What would happen if we ceased to be?” “What impact do we want to have on this planet?” “Are we willing to sell our souls for the sake of profit and power?”
Jobs and work as we know them will become redundant, obsolete. While the shift has been in motion for decades with robots in manufacturing, the advent of 3D printing, driverless cars and such, the pace is going to accelerate a hundred fold and in unprecedented ways with generative AI. Organizations, as we know them, will become relics of the past. It is already evident that the AI race is not going to stop anytime soon, irrespective of the dire warnings and outcome. Given the impending dramatic shifts, Wayfinders need to rapidly come together and lay the groundwork for authentic, purposeful, and life-affirming professions and pursuits.
The problems with AI cannot be fixed with a six-month moratorium. What is required is a different approach to the development and deployment of new technologies, an approach that prioritizes protection of consumer safety, democracy, and other values over returns to shareholders. ~There Is Only One Question That Matters with AI
The highlight in the quote is mine. Those, I believe, are the most pertinent words in that quotation. I will reiterate a little differently: “it is the responsibility of organizations to prioritize safety of all sentient beings (humans included) and be planetary stewards, and uphold values of democracy, pluriversality, justice, and other values over returns to shareholders.” The laws and regulations that made such shareholder profit mandatory were crafted precisely by such shareholders — the 1% billionaires, the investors, and venture capitalists.
Milton Friedman of the ‘famed’ Chicago school of economics introduced the theory in a 1970 essay for The New York Times titled “A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits”. In it, he argued that a company has no social responsibility to the public or society; its only responsibility is to its shareholders. He justified this view by considering to whom a company and its executives are beholden:
In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires…the key point is that, in his capacity as a corporate executive, the manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation…and his primary responsibility is to them. ~Wikipedia
Obviously Friedman conveniently forgot or bypassed a number of factors:
The use of nature as free resource
The externalization of the ecological and environmental harm
The socialization of losses and privatization of gains
The human labor involved in the amassing of capital
The expropriation of commons and lands that rightfully no business has any claim over
The suffering inflicted on individuals and societies in the race for profit (e.g., the Democratic Republic of Congo)
The neo-colonization of nations and cultures in the name of globalization and free market (happened as an outcome)
What Friedman advocated strengthened the foundations of an extractive, expropriative, and exploitative economy incarnating into a Molochian set of interlinked and perverse reward structures that has been driving corporations for decades. The point to note is that shareholder-profit is not a divine and etched-in-stone paradigm for success. It was merely the wish of a handful articulated by a neoclassical economist long dead, whose ideas were partisan and skewed to begin with and are now completely obsolete. They continue to exist because they serve those in power.
Unfortunately, his ideas were globalized in the form of neoliberal capitalism, austerity was imposed in the name of managing public debt, and many Global South economies had Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) forced on them by IMF and World Bank in order to receive financial assistance (which they wouldn’t have needed if the colonizers hadn’t looted them and destroyed their economies). The rest is history. The planet is imploding under the forces of GDP growth.
The intent of this brief detour is to show how the pernicious economic monomyth emanating from a handful has spread its tentacles across the globe and holds organizations in its grip. AI will simply exacerbate the existing malaise in manifold ways.
Becoming Wayfinders
Wayfinders are necessary, I would even say crucial, today. They will lay the foundations for a ‘world where many worlds fit,’ a world that moves from artificial growth and scarcity to the paradigm of abundance and enough-ness. They are the harbingers of a different civilizational order — one that is pluriversal, life-affirming, and visionary. Visionary organizations are needed to inspire and model generative sensibilities. It is “a practice that starts by reframing the world around us in radically new ways,” writes Sascha Haselmayer in The Slow Lane. Becoming a Wayfinder thus requires a recognition of the power of fearless imagination and shared dreaming, collective sensemaking, and the holding of space for what wants to emerge.
The sine qua non of the visionary is holding the vision of the transformed in a way that informs the transitional struggle. ~Becoming visionary: Reading and living in the existential mode
However, there are some essential steps to be undertaken before an organization can embark on this collective journey of transition. It is worthwhile remembering that Transition which entails fundamental changes in narratives and metaphors, processes and structures, values and beliefs, and culture on a systems level in order to attain greater coherence and purpose is a long, sometimes arduous, but always rewarding journey. The path will have pitfalls, traps, and also mirages. There may be false trails and the desire to take shortcuts. Hence, organizations need vision holders — the stewards, facilitators, convenors, connectors, and storytellers who weave new elements together into a coherent emergent system.
Organizations have to first undergo their rites of passage which require throwing off the shackles of the old monomyth, hospicing all that no longer serves the emerging future, and re-connecting with their larger purpose(s). Like any rites of passage, this will involve a conscious letting go of what no longer serves (hospicing and composting), followed by entry into unknown territories and learning to navigate it (the liminal space), and finally, consolidating and incorporating the new learnings and offering themselves in their new forms (the integration).
However, I am aware that these will remain as words in ether unless there are some ‘provisional’ frameworks and models to act as scaffoldings for this shift. I am using the word ‘provisional’ consciously; I don’t believe there can be any definitive frameworks; these will keep evolving and expanding based on local experiments, experiences, and explorations as well as the cultural cosmologies and ontologies.
Disclaimer: This is very much a work-in-progress diagram to capture and anchor my ideas. I have deliberately not put any directional arrows between the stages because organizations may be at any stage, could be using only parts of the process to begin with, and are completely free to toggle between different stages at their own pace. This is a holding container for some of the ideas as I develop them. The order of my descriptions below are not meant to be prescriptive or even guidelines. They are more in the nature of a compass, showing the next step depending on where you are.
Transition facilitators and designers are spatially and temporally aware in their vision and methods. They draw on knowledge and wisdom from the past and welcome the intelligence of diverse cosmologies and ontologies. They don’t make the error of ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutioning nor do they impose preconceived conclusions. Their approach is essentially dialogic, emergent, and imaginative. They conceive solutions in the present, respect learnings from the past, and owe their allegiance and responsibility to future generations.
Hospice and Compost — honoring the old story and learning from its lessons is an important part of stepping forth into the new. Even the most monstrous mistakes hold profound learnings and epiphanies. Maybe, these blunders and fallacies had to be made for us to re-cognize our inherent interconnectedness. From this deluge of blunders, we can still sieve out valuable realizations that can carry us into the future. We know today that the economic monomyth has been a monumental and short-sighted catastrophe that has wrecked the living planet.
Many parts of the dominant system need to make the transition from the old to the new, adapting to the emerging paradigm and finding their place in the emergent system. There are critical roles in stabilizing the old system as it dies, and containing the damage of collapse, especially for the most vulnerable.
Entering Liminality — this is perhaps the most challenging part. This is the actual journey that needs to be undertaken as a part of the larger transition. There are roles for facilitators, systems leaders, and visionaries ready to inspire change.
Transition design is most suited to “Complex, long-term and ‘unknown unknowns.” The context(s) where Transition Design is most likely to be used include where there are multiple causes and consequences for the scale of change needed, challenges are all intertwined, and the change needed will be at multiple scales and by galvanizing multiple sectors. ~Cassie Robinson
Imagining — I have written about the power of fearless imagination in Part 3 of the series. Imagination doesn’t mean unfettered and impossible daydreams. Imagination requires focused attention to one’s intuition, pattern-sensing abilities, synthesizing capacities, and a deep trust in oneself as well as one’s fellow beings. In the process of transition, imagination plays a crucial role. It takes the collective from a merely cognitive know-how to a deeper and interwoven sensemaking that integrates the head, heart, hand, and spirit. Therefore, it is crucial for Wayfinders to deliberately design infrastructures for imagination. (I write about this in the next part.)
Deliberately engaging in transformation processes inevitably requires imagination. We refer to imagination for transformations as interdependent cognitive and social processes that create representations of present and possible future states of the world that can inform public deliberation, policy, decision making, and behavior from the individual to the global scale. We contend that imagination is an essential capacity for securing ecological, social, economic, and cultural well-being in times of rapid and often unpredictable global change. ~Imagination and transformations to sustainable and just futures
Integrating — The emergent system forms as pioneers of new approaches start to connect and form networks and communities of practice, growing their influence and eventually superseding the old. At the same time, the dominant system begins its decline, and there is work to do in supporting the death and composting of the elements that won’t be carried forward. There are roles for convenors, connectors, and storytellers who weave new elements together into a coherent emergent system. ~Excerpts from Margaret Wheatley, reworded to suit the flow.
Transcending — This is the phase where the new practices, methods, and visions are reiterated, strengthened, and embedded in the daily workings. This serves to gradually shift the language and metaphors of organizations. When words start to shift, true transformation begins to happen. The machine metaphor has ruled for so long that we have forgotten organizations are living ecosystems, ruled by the same foundational laws of nature as the Amazon forest. In the Transcending phase, Wayfinders begin to actively let go of the old words and their associations, and increasingly begin to live by the new metaphor — that of a biocentric, living system.
New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities. This should be obvious in the case of poetic metaphor, where language is the medium through which new conceptual metaphors are created. ~George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By
Midwifing — While this is really an ongoing process and undergirds the whole transition design, I have also mentioned it separately to highlight the importance of nurturing and creating safe spaces for the nascent practices to thrive. Wayfinders stepping into this transition journey have to intentionally create holding spaces as a part of the journey. This can take the form of ongoing generative dialogues, collective fearless imagination practices (of which I write in the next part), and other methods like Joanna Macy’s The Work That Reconnects
In the next part, I write about the need for designing intentional spaces for imagination to thrive and the vision of the new to take root.