The Hames Report

The Veiled Impediment

Consider if you will three situations in which different groups of people have been tasked with changing the status quo in various ways (each according to a specific context) in order to deliver “better outcomes”. The first is enacted at a local community level, the second at a corporate level (which may or may not have international ramifications) and the third at a global level. 

Case 1. The Government Taskforce

Somewhere on the planet this week a government will appoint a taskforce or establish a Royal Commission to enquire into a matter of grave concern to the local community. The issue might be one of police corruption, the decriminalisation of drugs, food security, or the welfare of indigenous youth - but investigations will generally follow a similar path:

• Terms of reference will be set by bureaucrats in such a way as to circumscribe the investigation, and thence relevant evidence to be collected, while validating present assumptions (about the nature of the problem and its resolution)
• Designated experts will be dutifully summoned to repeat opinions already on the public record
• A panel will be convened to hear “new” evidence
• The community will be consulted - in at least one of two favoured ways:
  • Town Hall meetings may be organised to allow locals to vent their collective feelings - though these gatherings usually serve only to inflame previously known attitudes
  • Individuals will be invited to respond to a survey containing a number of predictable, tick-the-box, questions in which pre-ordained expressions of the problem are implicit.
• More likely than not the findings will avoid advocating substantial change, recognising governments' reticence in this regard, and merely reinforce current notions regarding what should be done.

Sometimes considerable public funds (the item most likely to attract the ire of talk-back radio hosts and the tabloid press) will be spent on these enquiries. Meanwhile relevant Ministers will be hoping to pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat by confirming novel, more effective, solutions for addressing the matter in question. The community's trust in government policy and decision-making is at stake. Reprisals for failure will be discernible via the ballot box at the next election.

Case 2. The Executive Leadership Team

As predictable as the annual migration of Pacific salmon, in at least one week every year, thousands of executive teams will seek prolonged sanctuary in their Boardrooms. Those from more profitable enterprises will probably zoom off to more exotic locations. The task ahead of them? To recast their strategy for the coming year.

Almost certainly they will be hoping to arrive at distinctive ways for increasing profits, strengthening their brands or driving alignment around a new operating model. Any strategic imperatives will have been decided in advance by the CEO - with appropriate input from the leadership team. Quite possibly they will be following advice from consultants who will have been asked to provide economic and industry forecasts for the next three years. These same advisers may also be facilitating the retreat using a generic process their associates developed for this purpose.

Over the course of two or three days participants will examine current results and productivity targets relative to their competitive position in the market, receive briefings on new products in the pipeline, and review any mergers or acquisitions in the offing. Other items, fitted in between social and sporting activities, may include, for example, talent management and customer satisfaction polls.

Following the retreat these business leaders will return to the more familiar routine of running their divisions - invigorated by their collegial commitment to the new plan and equally buoyed by the realisation that their strategic responsibilities are over for yet another year. At risk is the company's future performance, financial results and reputation, as well as shareholder value. Reprisals for failure (reflected in the marketplace and the stockmarket) could result in the sacking of the CEO and the replacement of key executives.

Case 3. The United Nations Summit

Towards the end of June, twenty years after the original Earth Summit, thousands of delegates from national governments, the private sector, NGOs and community groups will descend upon Rio de Janeiro once again for the UN’s Conference on Sustainable Development. Official discussions will focus on two main themes: How to build a green economy to achieve sustainable development (and lift people out of poverty) and how to improve international coordination for sustainable development.

Representatives at Rio+20 will be hoping to come away with renewed commitments as to how we can work together more effectively to reduce poverty, advance social equity and ensure environmental protection on an increasingly crowded planet.

On the Rio+20 website there is a noticeboard where messages of hope for successful outcomes from the summit have been put. These posts come from all over the world and from all sectors of society. They resonate as a collective cry of anguish - pleading as one for commonsense to prevail. Imploring far fewer words in favour of more urgent action, demanding a more courageous commitment to change, expressing unity as a species and concerns for future generations, these notes, many just brief epigrams, are a poignant reminder of how much faith we put in our elected leaders to know what to do in times of trouble and to put into action what needs doing.

In this instance risk is both extreme and existential - in that we are running out of time to make fundamental changes to ingrained patterns of industrial production and consumption. Failure in this context is too terrible to contemplate. It might mean we have forgone one of the best opportunities to tackle climate change and poverty. Reprisals for failure will be taken by nature. We might complain about the lack of political will. But ultimately the game will be out of our hands... 

The Veiled Impediment

In all three examples it is highly probable we will regard almost any achievement as limited and disappointing, or at least much less than most of us would have wanted and expected. There are good reasons for this. Most importantly there is an obstacle in the way that inhibits more effective and enduring change. It is hidden from view - which is why I call it the "veiled impediment".

But first I want to dismiss some of the more fallacious charges we are prone to use when reprimanding others. Especially an increasing tendency to blame people for less than satisfactory outcomes. I learned long ago from the great W. Edwards Deming that the majority of problems we encounter result from what statisticians refer to as common-causes rather than special-causes. Common-causes are the normal, historical, predictable and quantifiable variations in a system, whereas special-causes are unusual, not previously observed, non-quantifiable variations. In other words it is reasonable to suppose there is something inherently flawed about the processes we use, rather than any overt individual incompetence or negative interference.

For the most part the intentions of taskforce panels, executive teams and UN summit delegates are honourable - their aspirations similar to our own. They are upholding their values and fighting for what they believe to be true and fair. Appreciating this, and the significance of common-cause variation, compels a fundamental reframe as it shifts emphasis away from personalities to the issue of design.

So what is it about contemporary process design that is so defective? I believe the unchallenged culprit is habit. We generally comprehend a given situation using knowledge previously acquired and tested. It is actually quite rare for us to deliberately create new knowledge or fabricate new tools to deal with new problems. But that means we can only ever know what worked before and only ever use tools and techniques ordinarily available. We then rationalise these habits as "best practice". And who in their right mind would opt for second-best?

In the case of our protagonists almost all the information they acquire will point to them being on the right track. Even against the odds they probably anticipate success – otherwise why would they embark upon such ambitious endeavors in the first place?

But here’s the rub: in each of my three cases the level of deeper awareness (of integral consciousness) from which they are viewing their issues, the individual knowledge and collective understanding they bring to these matters, and the language and methods they are using to make sense of the information being thrown at them from all quarters, are utterly inadequate given the profound complexity of the matters with which they are dealing.

Worse still, they do not realise this. In fact it is highly probable they have convinced themselves the job they are doing is entirely acceptable, if not exceptional. This would be comic if it were not for the fact that literally billions of people’s lives depend on a new vision for humanity out of the UN summit; thousands of people will be impacted by any discrete strategic plan that lacks resilience in the face of change; and the community at large will suffer if a government taskforce or Royal Commission fails in its mission. 

Designing Better Outcomes

Much depends on what we mean by “better outcomes” of course and context is vitally important in this regard. Personally I interpret “better outcomes” to refer to three ostensibly discrete yet intimately related factors. Depending upon the depth of enquiry and the intensity of integral interrogation:

1. Better outcomes at level 1 means that enduring solutions (socially beneficial, culturally empathic, ethically apposite and economically feasible) can be found and applied to our most obdurate problems today

2. Better outcomes at level 2 means that upgraded means of sensing and making sense of the human condition are continuously incorporated into learning and enquiry processes - thereby leading to a situation where fewer problems of the type we are witnessing today are likely to re-occur in the future

3. Better outcomes at level 3 means that individual and collective epistemologies evolve onto higher planes of appreciation such that optimal expressions of what it means to be human (creativity, compassion and courage) find congruence in a new wisdom of panarchic communion that touches us all.

The implications are profound. Thinking-as-usual is a veiled impediment to progress. Like rats trapped on a treadmill it will get us nowhere and achieve little but for exhaustion and frustration.

Instead, we need to incorporate new ways of perceiving, clarifying, interpreting, conversing and responding to a myriad, continuously mutating, features within our many cogent constructions of the human story. And we need our design charrettes to evolve in alignment with this new consciousness.

In other words genuine progress (in government enquiries, corporate strategy development and international symposia alike) depends upon our ability to:

• discover more sophisticated ways of expressing what we are seeing, thinking, and feeling
• ensure tacit assumptions underpinning individual expressions of reality are transparent to others
• create more inventive and accurate methods for synthesising and liberating wisdom (including advanced pattern-finding techniques)
• imagine more inspiring futures that provide emotional continuity with our past yet liberate the human spirit and draw upon our innate desire for empathy, cooperation and unity in diversity
• expand and improve our use of real-time, granular, broadband intelligence from multiple sources
• compose a new vernacular for interweaving deeper reflection with collaborative action as well as the past with the present and the possible.

At a minimum there are ten principles we must incorporate and embed into our routine practices when planning and implementing change:

1. Design charrettes that include and connect all salient features - even when these are considered to be nominally beyond the scope of our enquiry as defined by others
2. Questions deliberately crafted to probe our innermost values, beliefs and assumptions in order to reveal and open up entirely fresh options and alternative pathways
3. Dialogical cycles that recursively and iteratively explore our individual and collective interiors (psychologies and cultures) as well as the more palpable exteriors (of the built environment, human behaviours, technologies and systems) we erroneously believe we can control
4. Immersive decision theatre facilities in which the most intricate scenarios can be visualised and played out in ways that surface a range of future strategic options
5. Analytical methods (quantitative and qualitative) that purposefully trawl across the “expanded now” of our total life experience (a compaction of past, present and possible future states of the natural or business ecosystems that concern us) in order to “include and transcend” potential pitfalls, flawed routines, outmoded stratagems, etc.
6. Mechanisms for accelerating our individual and collective learning metabolisms while institutionalising these to effect faster yet more considered trajectories for intentional evolution
7. Procedures to enable our attention density to remain constantly attuned to new or unanticipated developments in the broader world-system
8. Methodologies for using real-time intelligence to navigate changing conditions so that strategy becomes a continuous process of resilient design, review and recalibration
9. Shared narratives for portraying a range of possible futures and for guiding collective action within preferred futures
10. Tools and vocabulary that can be used to develop a mature capability for strategic leaning - rather than the contemporary bias for an immediate response when our senses warn us of an impending situation that needs our attention.

Unintended consequences

It seems to me that these ten design criteria must be critical attributes of any learning system intended to ensure that what we are doing and how we are doing it, today and into the future, is sustainable and relevant. Yet these design criteria are precisely what the protagonists in my three cases lack. It is also the reason I know not to expect “better outcomes” from their activities – irrespective of any extravagant promises made to the contrary - however much I hope that is not the case.

The sad truth is the final result from most strategy retreats, government taskforces and globally-sponsored summits, are predictable for their triteness, absence of imagination, the esteem accorded banal generalities, and a seemingly infinite recycling of clichéd aims and objectives dressed up in novel slogans.

Because of this inadequate systemic and self-awareness, the inability of current modes of enquiry to include and transcend such astonishing variety, the lack of an inclusive language for depicting complex patterns, and the impoverished methods we habitually use in place of thoughtfully designed, bespoke architectures, the pace of change towards an intentionally empathic future for humanity is incredibly and frustratingly slow.

The gradual awakening of citizens to various forms of oppression and injustice we are witnessing today in so many different forums and events around the world, especially in terms of how we deal more effectively with embedded corruption, political dictatorships, terrorists, peak oil, a rampaging banking sector, food security, climate change and the like are now mirrored in a similar prerequisite for transcending orthodoxies concerned with how we perceive, interpret, talk to each other and act upon such matters.

Without transformation of the principal means we use to comprehend the truth of our situation at any moment we may simply fall into the trap of assuming we know what is best and of reproducing what has already failed. If we do that for too much longer we should not be surprised if the collective voice of humanity rises up against those in authority to threaten a terrible retribution.

The Self-Attribution Fallacy

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1 per cent make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren’t responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.

The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers, across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill. Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.

Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers across Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin. When Kahneman tried to point this out they blanked him. The illusion of skill … is deeply ingrained in their culture.

 So much for the financial sector and its super-educated analysts. As for other kinds of business, you tell me. Is your boss possessed of judgement, vision and management skills superior to those of anyone else in the firm, or did he or she get there through bluff, bullshit and bullying?

In a study published by the journal Psychology, Crime and Law, Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon tested 39 senior managers and chief executives from leading British businesses. They compared the results to the same tests on patients at Broadmoor special hospital, where people who have been convicted of serious crimes are incarcerated. On certain indicators of psychopathy, the bosses’s scores either matched or exceeded those of the patients. In fact on these criteria they beat even the subset of patients who had been diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders.

The psychopathic traits on which the bosses scored so highly, Board and Fritzon point out, closely resemble the characteristics that companies look for. Those who have these traits often possess great skill in flattering and manipulating powerful people. Egocentricity, a strong sense of entitlement, a readiness to exploit others and a lack of empathy and conscience are also unlikely to damage their prospects in many corporations.

In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded. Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family you’re likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family you’re likely to go to business school.

This is not to suggest that all executives are psychopaths. It is to suggest that the economy has been rewarding the wrong skills. As the bosses have shaken off the trade unions and captured both regulators and tax authorities, the distinction between the productive and rentier upper classes has broken down. CEOs now behave like dukes, extracting from their financial estates sums out of all proportion to the work they do or the value they generate, sums that sometimes exhaust the businesses they parasitise. They are no more deserving of the share of wealth they’ve captured than oil sheikhs.

The rest of us are invited, by governments and by fawning interviews in the press, to subscribe to their myth of election: the belief that they are the chosen ones, possessed of superhuman talents. The very rich are often described as wealth creators. But they have preyed upon the earth’s natural wealth and their workers’ labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.

What has happened over the past 30 years is the capture of the world’s common treasury by a handful of people, assisted by neoliberal policies which were first imposed on rich nations by Thatcher and Reagan. I am now going to bombard you with figures. I’m sorry about that, but these numbers need to be tattoed on our minds. Between 1947 and 1979, productivity in the US rose by 119 per cent, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population rose by 122 per cent. But between 1979 and 2009, productivity rose by 80 per cent, while the income of the bottom fifth fell by 4 per cent. In roughly the same period, the income of the top 1 per cent rose by 270 per cent.

In the UK, the money earned by the poorest tenth fell by 12 per cent between 1999 and 2009, while the money made by the richest 10 per cent rose by 37 per cent. The Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, climbed in this country from 26 in 1979 to 40 in 2009.

In his book The Haves and the Have Nots, Branko Milanovic tries to discover who was the richest person who has ever lived. Beginning with the loaded Roman triumvir Marcus Crassus, he measures wealth according to the quantity of his compatriots’ labour a rich man could buy. It appears that the richest man to have lived in the past 2000 years is alive today. Carlos Slim could buy the labour of 440,000 average Mexicans. This makes him 14 times as rich as Crassus, nine times as rich as Carnegie and four times as rich as Rockefeller.

Until recently, we were mesmerised by the bosses’ self-attribution. Their acolytes, in academia, the media, think tanks and government, created an extensive infrastructure of junk economics and flattery to justify their seizure of other people’s wealth. So immersed in this nonsense did we become that we seldom challenged its veracity.

This is now changing. On Sunday evening I witnessed a remarkable thing: a debate on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral between Stuart Fraser, chairman of the Corporation of the City of London, another official from the Corporation, the turbulent priest Father William Taylor, John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network and the people of Occupy London. It had something of the flavour of the Putney debates of 1647. For the first time in decades – and all credit to the Corporation officials for turning up – financial power was obliged to answer directly to the people.

It felt like history being made. The undeserving rich are now in the frame, and the rest of us want our money back.

This article was written by George Monbiot and reproduced here with his permission. The Self-Attribution Fallacy was first published in The Guardian on 7th November 2011 (see www.guardian.co.uk). George's blogs are online at www.monbiot.com

 

 

Thinking for a Change

The dilemmas facing humanity have become so complex they can only be resolved by comprehending the situation from a higher level of collective consciousness. Once that new state of awareness has been reached, however, we will be able to choose a profoundly different evolutionary path to that recently pursued with such self-interest and short-sighted enthusiasm.

Disruptions to the way planet Earth works, particularly those induced by the ingrained habits of seven billion people all aspiring to similar levels of affluence, can no longer be ignored. At some stage myths must give way to truths if disaster is to be averted.

As Paul Gilding points out so eloquently in his recent book The Great Disruption there is plenty to be positive about. But only if we think differently and more deeply about the human condition and rise above those beliefs and practices that have become an impediment to genuine progress.

Three priorities have surfaced from the fog of scientific evidence, propaganda (and sheer mischief) surrounding issues like climate change. First, policies aimed at putting a stop to unsustainable activities must be scaled up. Second, smart technologies must be applied to the underlying causes of our problems rather than to their symptoms. Third, we must reframe our thinking to embody entirely new possibilities for reimagining what we do (that is both socially desirable and economically feasible) and how we do it.

These priorities are as relevant for business as they are for governments and civil society. The time has long since passed when business could simply mind its own business. Indeed many of the institutions and practices conceived within the 19^th century model of industrial economism, a model that initially brought such affluence to so many, appear now to be steering us down a path to ruin. I am aware that it is impossible to prove such a thesis. But nor do I intend waiting until I have evidence I am correct.

There are many alternatives available to us, ranging from cleaner, adaptive industries and smarter, benign practices to fewer toxic raw materials and biomimicry as a model for organizing and innovating. Most of these alternatives are preferable to what currently exists. However we need to let go of old prejudices and fears that the future will inevitably be worse than the past if such new options are to be implemented quickly. This is the prime lesson informing Gilding’s thesis.

All of which is easier said than done of course. Tackling any one of these imperatives would be difficult enough. Finding ways to adopt all three presents a formidable challenge, not least because the customary ways for administering human affairs have shifted responsibilities to others. Deliberately reframing our thinking to escape the gravitational pull of the past will demand an expansive emancipation of mind, liberation from obsolete ideologies and dogma, and a collective, progressive and audacious awakening to higher levels of consciousness concerning our shared purpose.

Changing behavioural patterns is relatively easy. We do it all the time. Government policies, corporate marketing and public relations campaigns all effectively play on our desires or fears in order to manipulate how we behave. But whereas most present-day marketing efforts are commercially orientated, using psychology to escalate consumerism - even where prosperity without economic growth would be a more sane goal in today’s circumstances - we are failing to use those same mechanisms to endorse the reduction, re-use and recycling of our most precious resources. Clearly much has still to be done even in that regard. But changing our underlying beliefs is far more difficult.

Ultimately though, permanent behavioural change will stem from the structural redesign of our most life-critical systems – particularly those in which human beings interface with nature and with each other. It is often forgotten that all systems are perfectly designed to get the results they get. That is why natural systems remain so resilient.

The problem is that none of our social systems have been designed to consciously evolve. We are, quite literally, trapped in the past. That is precisely why our thinking has to change. In effect we must become architects of our own evolution rather than pawns in a game we assume to be controlled by others.

The inevitable transition to cleaner, low-carbon sources of energy (like solar and hydrogen for example) together with the use of smarter, more efficient, distributed networks that reduce the amount of energy we use, will eventually enable the complete eradication of toxic fuels. At the same time the industries spawned from this transition will generate untold wealth. Designing a sustainable and secure food system capable of providing nourishment for seven billion people or more is also desirable – and readily achievable. Re-engineering the fundamentals of the global economy to eradicate waste, promote equity and protect the resources we all share is also realistic.

But there is a catch. Before the trapeze artist leaps into space he must step off the platform on which he is standing. Systemic reinventions of this nature requires a strategic, emotional and “transcendent” commitment to the new story in addition to an appreciation of systemic design that is rare, so devoid of integral intelligence has our conditioning become.

In terms of systemic design and renewal there are two crucial keys to success. Both rely on our capacity and willingness to reframe our notions about what really matters, to boldly step into new ways of knowing and being, and to openly engage with others in that metamorphosis.

The first key is the ability to imagine and communicate an alternative social “meme” (together with compelling narratives) that supersedes more utilitarian goals – at least encompassing happiness, love and compassion in healthier balance with material wealth and well-being. This key unlocks hope and restores fairness. The second key is the ability to elude the curse of knowledge that traps us in an industrial past and allows us to make significantly different choices about the future. This key unlocks a sense of new possibilities and restores trust.

Unfettering an economy based on value exchange in the context of abundance (rather than one of compounding debt in a framework of financial scarcity, for example) could emancipate new forms of enterprise employing many more people than today’s sunset industries. Using renewable sources of energy to establish industrial ecologies that transform and adapt to a warming planet is far wiser than defending the past in an attempt to protect that which could destroy us. [Industry lobbyists take note!] Likewise, accessing peer-to-peer digital media to invite the collective expression of policies and even constitutions (instead of putting our faith in the increasingly detached whims of a few elected representatives) might provide a platform for a far more democratic and empathic society. And so on…

Such strategic choices become possible because of the most fundamental shift in human history: the emergence of a mode of inventiveness (comprising intelligence, foresight and wisdom) that allows new ways of being, thinking and doing to be envisaged and, through cooperation and invention, to be attained.

No doubt humanity can flourish. But only if we learn to transcend obsolete beliefs and fears to engage in deeper conversations that (i) include all salient features of the system we desire to create, (ii) anticipate the intended and unintended consequences of those desires, and (iii) lift the human spirit out of the mire of believing the past cannot be surpassed and that our situation is dire and will only get worse.

In facing a range of complex dilemmas it does us no good to continue to deny the truth. The global outlook is tense. Natural disasters, the spiraling cost of food, geo-political conflict and the collapse of natural systems all seem to herald an end-game in which the extinction of our species is conceivable. We are witness to cascading failures in the systems that support life. Family incomes are being squeezed. We try to do more with less. Politicians focus on trivia. Simple things seem not to work as well as they once did. We fret about how best to survive the present even though we care passionately about the planet and our children’s future.

Yet the solution is in our own hands. Burying our heads in the sand and ignoring reality will not help. Quarantining ourselves from reality we begin to lose the thread of affiliation that otherwise nourishes and sustains us. We cannot isolate ourselves from the truth however hard we might try. It only aggravates our anxieties.

Over a century ago an ambitious geo-engineering project was implemented. Responding to a major planetary issue of the time two German scientists, Haber and Bosch, made nitrogen-rich fertilizer available to farmers, thus significantly increasing the annual amount of nitrogen fixed on land. The unintended consequences were catastrophic: the human population mushroomed exponentially.

But having created the problem we must live with it. By participating in the actuality of our predicament we can restore hope while exploring practical pathways into the future. Our starting point is not the changing of a light bulb nor the purchasing of a more fuel-efficient car. On the contrary renewal begins with a sense of responsibility to each other and to the planet. Re-envisaging a new purpose for humanity must now become our prime goal. We must think big for a change.

University Challenge

All over the world, in dissimilar cultures and traditions, institutions of higher learning have an aspiration (possibly sometimes felt as a moral obligation) to lead. Often this remains just an unfulfilled goal. There are good reasons for that.

As a result of the complex dynamics underpinning change, leading implies a degree of thinking and conduct that is strategically relevant and systemically inclusive. Today that entails envisaging a coherent role in a society poised precariously on a fault line between imminent collapse and a paradigmatic re-awakening.

But herein lies a paradox. Since the invention of the modern university in the 12th century, higher education institutions have responded to, rather than led, fundamental changes in society. They have generally done this in ways that have increased our understanding of currently accepted truths, at the same time creating knowledge to challenge those truths. Typically the latter eventually leads to an evolution of world-view, invariably accompanied by new value systems.

In the past, the dominance of successive meta-disciplines (originally theology, then classics, humanities and, more recently, science) have certainly provided frames of relevancy for learning about significant world-views and societal transitions. Even so, the forces for change have generally emerged from society – not from within the walls of the academy. In fact one might reasonably assert that academic institutions have simply been an alternative way of engaging with the world.

However, in an age where knowledge is a commodity and more easily acquired than at any other time, where, by the year 2010, technical knowledge may be doubling every 72 hours, and where new technologies are constantly enhancing our capability to connect and interact with anyone, at any time, for any purpose, the sheer numbers of people now inhabiting the planet (or, more correctly, the tensions inherent within contradictory sets of values that ultimately motivate self-interest) are causing a tectonic shift we are only just beginning to grasp.

This shift is transformative. It is changing dominant truths while intensifying and accelerating our capacity to share ideas. Our response must be to adapt and change - not to retreat!

In order for universities to remain strategically relevant and viable in this context, we must recalibrate our relevancy frames once more so as to accommodate different perspectives and uncommon beliefs.

But whereas previous societal transitions resulted merely in subtle re-framings within the academy, usually accompanied by small transfers of disciplinary emphasis and influence, today’s dynamic complexity resulting from successive phases of globalisation presents an opportunity for universities to step into a genuine leadership role, as well as contributing to a development in the nature of leadership itself.

Globalisation, of course, is not a new phenomenon. Stretching at least as far back as 1420 when nation states began to send out fleets of explorers to discover new lands they could then colonize and pillage, followed by corporate forays into international markets at the time of the industrial revolution, and culminating in the more recent emancipation of individual entrepreneurship through web-enabled technologies and more or less unrestricted access to capital markets, successive waves of globalisation have effectively fashioned a new reality.

The dynamically complex circumstances in which we now find ourselves, the state I refer to as globalism (increasingly referred to as globality) represents a paradigm shift in our ability to comprehend more fully the human condition. But while it signifies a novel set of truths it also requires a novel set of responses.

Globalism is already characterized by some unique qualities: multi-polar hubs of economic and geopolitical activity; urbanization; the electronic distribution of networked information and knowledge; disruptive innovation (particularly through the convergence of digital and genomic codes); cultural fusion; a move away from managing tangible things to shaping intangible relationships and experiences; the merging of Asian philosophy and Western business models; and the demise of boundaries once thought sacrosanct – particularly in terms of geopolitical, racial, functional and class distinctions.

And although there is yet little evidence to support such a view, I believe globalism may also have triggered a power shift of economic and moral authority away from the US and Europe towards China, India, South East Asia and, potentially, even the forgotten and most plundered continents of Africa and South America.

What we may be witnessing, too, in the current credit crisis is the beginning of the end of the US model of capitalism. This really should come as no surprise. Globalism has created unprecedented material wealth for a few and untold misery for many. But the engine of economic growth and the assumptions on which that growth was premised are unsustainable given current demographic and environmental trends.

How do we know? Because issues such as the current turmoil in financial markets, global warming, spiralling food costs, water scarcity, peak oil, endemic poverty and conflict, are not discrete issues. Nor should they be dealt with as discrete issues – in spite of the fact that overwhelmingly this has been the political response to date.

On the contrary, all of these problems are but interconnected symptoms of a catastrophic design flaw inherent within the entire ecosystem of which we are a part. Unintended though they may be, these symptoms are a clear indication that the notion of progress, at least in terms of limitless economic growth and development, a rationale often used by free market economists to defend and to sustain our profligate life style, is ultimately flawed. Any reputable systems designer would tell you that such a system must eventually fail.

The most critical aspect of this particular design flaw seems to be the certainty with which we have fabricated a society founded on three untenable pillars:

• competition as the basis for much human interaction and development
• non-renewable energy (i.e. petrochemicals) as the source for transportation, production and consumption
• debt and the politicization of money as the foundation for all economic activity.

It seems clear, therefore, that over the coming few decades we are going to have to do something we have never before attempted. That is to reinvent the entire material and philosophical basis of our civilization – substituting new assumptions and intentions to relieve the stresses on the current system and thus prevent a catastrophic collapse.

This will require leadership at an altogether different level of consciousness. Leadership that is able to transcend ego and put aside individual self-interest. Leadership that is a force for good in the world. Leadership that is inclusive of all voices and cultures. Leadership that utilizes new practices, new methods and new tools to achieve new breakthroughs.

Above all it requires that we navigate changing conditions intelligently (by making decisions using real-time information from the whole system) and wisely (by engaging entire communities intent on creating better futures for themselves and for each other) in order to avoid the hubris, mind traps and design flaws of the past.

Naturally, there are considerable undertones concerning this proposition (comprising opportunities as well as uncertainties and risks) for the business of learning in the years ahead. And there are choices to be made: to tenaciously cling to the well-worn, venerable traditions of the past or to step into a new epistemology of leadership, for example...

It is my passionate belief that universities will either find themselves struggling against the odds to retain their delusions of autonomy and independence or they will come together (perhaps reluctantly at first) to help and guide society in reacting more intelligently and purposefully to current circumstances in ways that enable a more rapid transition to a global ecosystem based upon renewable energy, underpinned by principles of sufficiency rather than avarice, and supported by a public more inclined to collaborate than to compete.

The latter is a strategic leadership role. Strategic leadership of this nature will entail a significant renewal of the academy’s role and responsibilities within society. It will include the invention of entirely new models and structures for learning about and using new knowledge. It will necessitate demolishing the ivory tower in order to reconnect more effectively with the global community and its actual needs rather than its superficial wants. Above all it will mean transcending narrow-minded institutional self-interests in order to unshackle regional cooperation and international partnerships.

The notion that cooperation is of critical importance comes from a realization that we need collaboration on an unprecedented scale if we are to resolve humanity’s most pressing issues. Most of today’s more pressing problems are universal in nature. They cannot be solved, as in the past, by old thinking or problem resolution by discrete entities. There are no boundaries now. We live in a borderless world – a world of zero geography.

The willingness to collaborate, however, must rapidly evolve into the initiation of a global dialogue where the intention is to create the kind of world we want rather than merely to punctuate circumstances and respond to events as victims of circumstance. Perhaps I am asserting the obvious. But leadership of this nature is what most venerable institutions, including universities, have been content to avoid.

I am deliberately proposing a revitalized role of strategic leadership for the academy. A role that elevates the importance of collaborative inquiry and research in terms of enacting a globally distributed brain that functions on behalf of the global community.

Within that context, conversation and translation are of the essence. Transformative narrative will be a necessary component for whole-of-system innovation and design discoveries.

Consequently the processes of dialogue I envisage must be able to keep people engaged; surmount bias, blind spots and self-interest; and deconstruct meaning prior to reconstructing and legitimizing new meaning. Narrative processes of this nature should liberate wisdom and diversity that can be applied to the design of strategically relevant and generatively viable systems.

Knowing oneself is generally regarded as a prerequisite for any such collaborative process. At an institutional level it is to be anticipated that the learning business of the future will focus more on the creation and application of integral knowledge across global networks than on the dissemination of knowledge by a teacher in a classroom.

This is an uncomfortable proposition for many academics even to consider let alone accept. Being inextricably entangled with issues of identity and purpose it has existential implications. But the digital world has no respect for tradition and this is something we need to admit in order to make progress.

We might expect then that the future business of learning will shift from its traditional role in the teaching  of separate disciplines to the establishment of more integral forms of inquiry and more diverse forms of collaborative research and intervention.

This will invariably give rise to collective initiatives that point to the future rather than merely recycle past knowledge; allocate resources across global networks in ways that allow us to deal more effectively with the major issues of our time; connect with and engage diverse beliefs and world views rather than insisting upon the continued relevancy and superiority of the Eurocentric worldview; offer an integral (whole systems) approach to resolving the complex issues of our time and to understanding better the human condition.

I find it curious that the mechanisms we humans have devised to enable orderly evolutionary change (just take the law, media, nation state and academy as examples) are the very institutions resisting deep-seated change. All at a time when the status quo and the dead hand of bureaucracy have become enemies threatening our very survival.

That will change. It has to. But only if the academy is seen to be generating truth, wisdom and utility will it survive. Anything less and it probably deserves to perish. No industry is immune from the unsettling paradigmatic shift impacting today’s world - least of all businesses of learning. But it remains to be seen whether or not the learning business can respond in ways that are appropriate and viable in the longer term.

That is the real challenge for institutions of higher education in going global. It is an exciting and a formidable challenge. But it is a challenge the academy ignores at its peril.

These thoughts are an imaginative after-the event reconstruction of the closing plenary address delivered to delegates at Going Global 3, the British Council’s flagship conference on higher education, in London on Friday 5th December 2008.

Ivory Towers

Economists and bankers one day; university vice-chancellors the next! Life is never dull in the world of corporate philosophy. Especially when entrenched belief systems need a good shake up.

Universities have endured for centuries. Why should they need to change today? That was the question put to me just last week by the vice chancellor (research) of one of Asia’s top-ranking business schools. After drawing in my breath sharply in a credible simulation of disbelief my answer went roughly as follows…

Humanity is entering a period of turbulence that is going to touch almost everyone. The world is out of kilter. Among other factors too complex to go into here, the extraordinary dynamism arising from the convergence of scientific discoveries and the high-tech enabling of globalization in its current phase (on one hand) and potentially catastrophic environmental trends (on the other) are propelling us towards a great societal transition. A transition in which we are going to have to redesign the entire material basis of our civilization.

What is more the rate of change, of both human advancement and planetary degradation (for these are the issues at stake) appears to be accelerating exponentially. Unlike previous revolutions however, which emerged purely out of human need and ingenuity, we are entangled in a complex web of destructive natural forces and unsustainable human activities. Whereas previous revolutions took many decades before new patterns of production and consumption were embedded, this one will take possibly 10 to 15 years to alter much of what we do and how we do it.

Meanwhile alarming symptoms of this malaise, such as climate change, the rising price of food, the lack of water and energy, and new epidemics that are rarely mentioned in the press (like the incidence of a whole range of autoimmune diseases, for example) are close to spinning entirely out of our control, providing further impetus for societal change (or civilizational collapse) on an unprecedented scale.

Other signs of this are already evident. In terms of the global economy we have started the evolutionary shift from an obsolescent industreality (dominated by an predominantly Anglo Saxon legacy of both beneficial and pernicious behaviours) to a profoundly interconnected economy where, once again, China and India are certain to assume influential (perhaps dominant) roles.

The rapid rate of urbanisation in countries like China has given us an opportunity to take principles of abundance (rather than scarcity) as a starting point for architectural and industrial designs intent on creating sustainable, closed-loop, systems of production and consumption. Capitalism is adapting to accommodate tumultuous business conditions. Even political agendas are becoming more universally inclusive.

So too is human consciousness. Today we are much more inclined to think of ourselves as a whole earth community inhabiting a fragile planet whose very life force is being suffocated by profligate practices we must change. Meanwhile the nation state is teetering on the brink of irrelevancy and we continue to allow the malignant force of organized religion to cause unnecessary conflict and confusion.

But other factors, too, including breakthroughs in cognitive brain science, genomic drugs that amplify human intelligence and other neurological enhancements, are also altering how we might learn to adapt to these new realities. In fact the ability to continuously adapt (to changing and mostly unforeseen circumstances) has become critical for everyone on the planet, including businesses and, by implication, society's institutions.

Since the invention of the modern university in the 12th century, higher education institutions have always responded to fundamental changes in society. The forces for change have always emerged from society – that is from outside, not from within, the walls of academia. In fact the university was simply a different way of engaging with the world.

Down through the ages, the dominance of certain disciplines - theology, classics, humanities and more recently science - has followed profound changes in society. Today’s transition is leading, as before, to a learning revolution. But whereas past learning revolutions resulted in a change of disciplinary focus, the current learning revolution is resulting in profound changes to focus, direction and delivery of an ever-changing curriculum. 

The unified national systems in the higher education sectors of many countries encourages universities to behave as if they are still living in the 19th century. They are distinctive only for their uniformity, their copycat policies, and the illusion of difference. Yet in so many recent reports purporting to examine the health of this sector over the years, employers have stated their dissatisfaction with university graduates claiming they are not imaginative or original thinkers nor are they able to reason with any degree of logical consistency. They can remember a few basic facts. But what use is this when facts go out of date so rapidly?

If businesses behave this way they go out of business. To all intents and purposes, if colleges and universities refuse to examine how they might need to operate in a world of enabling technologies and of systemic complexity (in order to reinvent themselves) they will simply lose control and influence over higher learning. They may well lose their niche as an industry. 

Many universities around the world have already lost the plot. Higher loads of bureaucratic trivia have triggered a brain-drain that is unstoppable in some countries. In the West, economic rationalists have targeted extensive cost cutting which has led to depleted resources and a further exodus of talent. One might have thought that, in these circumstances, it would be wise to position oneself for renewal.

The global information economy puts a premium on intellectual capital – increasing pressure to remain at the forefront of knowledge creation and commercialization. This requires life-long learning and a corresponding rise in the use of continuing education and professional development. Universities need to reflect on important future issues prior to developing new policy platforms that align with this and other real world trends. Only then will they be in a position to reframe their purpose and guarantee continued relevance. Take the following, for example:

1. COST VERSUS VALUE
There is a growing belief in some quarters that public higher education is taking too big a bite out of state budgets. Increasingly technology is seen as a vehicle for reducing the costs of learning. Internet-based programs offer the possibility of customised learning anywhere and at any time of the day or night, thus threatening more traditional methods of instruction.

Distance learning is being driven by changing demographics. The fastest growing group attending higher education in the past 20 years are working, part-time, females over 25 years old. This group want to increase their salaries and advance their careers. They are prime candidates for education delivered to their homes and offices.The pervasiveness of web-based, internet technologies will increasingly add momentum to distance learning with the capacity to reach previously unimaginable numbers globally. But attitudes will need to change.

One of the more entrenched beliefs concerns costs. It is widely held that increased value necessitates increased costs and consequently higher student fees. But that is an economic orthodoxy which has been proven wrong many times over. Universities are no longer quarantined from global market forces. If they are to discover new and uncontested market space they can make their own, each academic institution will need to find ways of enhancing its unique value while reducing the cost of certain factors on which it has traditionally competed.

2. REMAINING RELEVANT
Many people in the teaching profession automatically assume that universities will have a pivotal role to play in future societal development. I am not so sure – unless there are unique and compelling reasons for their existence.

The modern university is a human invention. It has adapted at various times to respond to societal change. These adaptations have depended upon changes in the contextual environment. But an invention is just that. It does not necessarily persist. Nothing can be guaranteed. New inventions come along and others fall by the wayside. That is life.

Arrogance has written off entire industries in the past while new ones have constantly emerged. Higher education will need to become more relevant, more aligned with reality and more strategically focused if it hopes to have an industry to shape in tomorrow’s world.

3. VIABILITY
The ivory tower is an unfortunate metaphor in a world where connections and relationships beyond the boundaries of the institution matter more and more.

The standard models of university higher education are no longer viable. Increasing competition (particularly from new competitors) coupled with less public funding; increasing tensions and dilemmas to manage (as between teaching and research, academics and administrators, for example); slowness to change due to inertia in the system; and an increase in demand for university places coupled with fewer staff to cope with this teaching load, all indicate a model that is unsustainable.

The struggle to reconcile internal values, cultures and aspirations with the very different modes of operation required to meet new and demanding student expectations demands a fundamental shift from a focus on individual academic competence to a university-wide common purpose and strategic framework. And  then beyond that to global alliances and partnerships.

4. CRUMBLING MONOPOLIES
When technologies shift, knowledge monopolies crumble. Is it possible that academics and academic work will not remain the primary function and focus of the future university?

Deciding what are core and non-core activities will be crucial in determining the future role of teachers, just as has been the case in the nursing profession, for example. Project work (rather than ongoing tenure) will most likely assume greater significance. And as new forms of contractual arrangements emerge many universities may simply become brokers in globally distributed knowledge systems.

Even in the best case scenarios academic work will need to be re-designed to take into account pressures regarding numbers and delivery. It is quite possible that links, relationships with industry, research and technological delivery systems may become the dominant focal point for university staff in the future.

5. INTEGRAL KNOWLEDGE
Original ideas often come from reassembling knowledge in new ways. In the past we tended to reduce knowledge into its various components, labeling and promoting these discrete elements as if they were somehow preordained. That brought us to where we find ourselves today. We now recognize this to be untenable. So structuring knowledge differently is an imperative.

Today we have embarked upon a deliberate path of re-synthesizing knowledge. This is no mere coincidence. Over the past 30 years, spurred by information technologies and a newfound mobility, the sum total of human knowledge, experience and wisdom has become available to us. Knowledge has become global.

In the process we are discovering much (especially about ourselves) that was previously lost to us. Indigenous knowledge and integral practice (as in the integration of disciplines into meta-disciplines like strategic foresight and integral science for example) are becoming essential means of shifting human consciousness beyond the merely fearful, mundane and trivial.

In the modern era, too, marshaling information is no longer enough to constitute learning. It’s what you do with this information that counts. That is why the humanities are more relevant than ever. Subjects like philosophy, history and literature can teach us how to interpret information and how to argue a point of view. That kind of learning is essential for innovation and for entrepreneurship. Music teaches valuable lessons about time and space. Similarly, visual thinking is critical to using computers and to manipulating images across multiple dimensions.

It is a sad indictment of many universities that they do not appreciate the power of integral practice and are still caught up in a time warp where discrete disciplines (typically vocationally focused) rule.

6. SACKING CUSTOMERS
The financial survival of educational institutions and the growing need for continuous, lifelong learning, demand that universities become more like clubs or societies that extend membership over a lifetime. Think about it. Higher learning is the only business that has a ceremony for getting rid of its customers.

Colleges spend thousands of dollars recruiting students and then, after three, four or five years, these same colleges make students dress up in a gown, march them across a platform in full public view, and then ritually fire them!

Now imagine an MBA program that saw the value of its customers as extending far beyond the years that they spent on a campus. Instead of firing people after a few years, such a program would shift its emphasis away from graduation to lifelong learning through membership of the institution. Students would remain members as long as they undertook courses, whether those courses were conducted online or on campus. The goal would be to keep members over the life cycle of their careers – and even into post-retirement. Learning would be something that was continuous.

There is no doubt in my mind. Educational institutions that desire to ride the new global economy will move from the industrial age event model to a model that turns students into members of a network – a network that keeps them engaged over the course of their life. 

7. CORPORATIONS ARE CLIENTS TOO
Corporations are now demanding executive education that is much more action-orientated. They want programs that change individuals as well as the enterprise. Real-life issues and dilemmas now become the material for learning in real time. In this context staff become consultants to each other.

And now that technology allows us to extend learning into the period after people leave campus we can also tap into communities of interest and continue the dialogue created in sessions. This can be used as an open source research lab that keeps everyone abreast of what is working and what is not working.

Obviously new ground rules for working in partnership with business still need to be established and constantly refined. This will require universities to review their traditional roles of research, teaching and service – and the interconnections between these, previously understood to be inextricably intertwined.

8. LOOKING GOOD
Education will never look the same as it once did. Learning just doesn’t sink in when you cut it up into small bites. Today it has to be a continuous and compelling engagement with life.

Like many corporations today Levi Strauss was telling its managers that they needed to be different – a new kind of manager, responsible for ensuring that learning was happening. But their training continued to occur inside the same old windowless hotel rooms. Naturally, attendance dropped off.

Until, that is, the company shifted its business model to become a brand management organization. Training sessions were shifted to new environments like art galleries, nightclubs, and other venues that were right in the center of the consumer marketplace. Facilitators gave cameras to Levi Strauss employees and told them to find examples of brand equity being built or destroyed, to talk to consumers about products, and to bring all of that information back to the group.

If you are going to be a consumer-focused institution you have to do it in a consumer-focused way. The learning environment has to reflect a corporate client's public messages, strategic direction and identity, and culture.

9. DEMOCRACY
Ultimately, you would have to think, e-learning must change democracy. One could argue the Internet has already brought democracy to education: access is available anywhere, costs are tumbling, place and time are not important any more. The only resistance is cultural opposition to learning online instead of on campus. Much of this opposition comes from established educators, though their monopoly is crumbling.

I am only really scratching the surface here of why change is inevitable in the higher education sector. We have not seriously examined topics like assessment, funding models and teacher training; the impact of global issues on learning; how integral practices will enter the curriculum displacing obsolescent disciplines; nor how enhanced intelligence methods might change how knowledge is created and processed.

Even so, I have no doubt the higher education sector must restructure. And from first principles if  institutions are to address the many dilemmas inherent in today's context for change. Distinctiveness, not conformity, needs to emerge. But the willingness and ability to relinquish autonomy in order to become part of an expansive global learning network ( a virtuous investment) will also be crucial.

Possibly the biggest challenge in all of this will be in universities choosing whether they remain discrete, self-governing entities or opt to become specialist hubs in vast learning networks spanning the globe. In both contexts, academics must become something else rather than just transmitters of knowledge. In order to facilitate learning they will need to develop new skills – especially in terms of flexibility, relationship management, communications and creativity. They will also need to become better skilled at using technology. The biggest stumbling block in that regard is not in the learning but in how teachers apply their learning effectively.

Another critical challenge will stem from a need to manage the diverse systems of alliances and partnerships implied by such global learning networks; the kind of relationships inherent in the linking of distribution and administrative channels of venture capitalists with technical providers in universities, for example. Managing the interaction between the content expert, the packaging expert and the distributor will be a key to success as it requires an administrative system that can work worldwide for both faculty and students.

As we work with new interactive technologies and individually enhanced intelligence, learning will continue its journey of transformation from knowledge as matter to knowing as process.

Yesterday's conventional wisdom dictated that content was King. In today's connected economy there is a realization that context is everything. The trouble with that system was that, while students learned a whole raft of facts and lots of theory, they ended up with very little sense of themselves as being what they were learning about – of becoming different people in the process. In other words there was a chasm between personal identity and personal knowledge.

Always-on' internet technologies (the next generation) coupled to enhanced cognitive capabilities will enable learning to occur invisibly and automatically as it melds with doing. That is a big shift from the days when educators packaged materials and then funneled these into the heads of learners. The trouble with this system is it raises the fundamental question yet again, Whither the University?