John’s opening post in a thread on the Group Partners discussion forum. Replies from other members are left out.
All my life I think I have found it easier to think and construct thoughts visually rather than in any other way, in fact I am not sure there is any other way to think, just to make my point again. I look back and cannot remember any occasion where the record of my life’s activity is anything other than a visual one, of course added to enormously when taste and smell or a sound adds to the effect but for me the primary record is always a visual one.
Now my other assertion is based on the belief that actually ”we are all becoming immune to so much, we are in some way separated from reality. We are in many ways and at many times isolated and without context. We are in fact subject to the illusions perpetrated on us by circumstances beyond our control and are in fact the unwitting subjects of the resulting chaos and complexity of today’s world”.
I now forget where I found those fragments but due credit to them and apologies and respect to whoever I have plagiarized.
Nowhere is this complexity more apparent than in business and as those of you reading this are probably running or senior contributors to business and this reality conspires to affect everything we do we had better understand what we are dealing with.
I found a really interesting argument in one of my favorite books ‘The Ingenuity Gap’ by Thomas Homer-Dixon and it was related to then somewhat obscure notion of Postmodernism. Postmodernism as defined by the dictionary…
Postmodernism: In literature, architecture, the arts etc., a movement that reacts against modern tendencies especially by drawing attention to former convention.
Postmodernism an ‘ism which infects almost every thing we see, feel and hear, but a very pertinent word and a very visual word which can hold much meaning as we continue to somewhat painfully experience the daily discussions we have with leaders of business.
The following couple of paragraphs should in fact be credited to David Harvey from his book on postmodernism. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell 1989)
“Postmodernism rejects all efforts to identify objective truths, universal and enduring patterns in nature and human history, and ideal forms of social order. Its hallmarks are “fragmentation, indeterminacy, and intense distrust of all universal or ‘totalizing’ discourses (to use the favored phrase)”.
"Postmodernism extols the ephemeral, the fragmented, the discontinuous, and the chaotic: it swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and the chaotic currents of changes as if that’s all there is. As a result it abandons all sense of historical continuity and memory, while simultaneously developing an incredible ability to plunder history and absorb whatever it finds there as some aspect of the present.”
One can begin to see the parallels I am drawing in all this within the business world we are dealing with today and the seeming unwillingness to do things differently even if these things would seem to be compelling or appear more valuable. Is it that we are all lost?
I feel the superficiality and imprecision of decision making and the isolation of our clients in trying to communicate with us through the briefing and analysis process coupled with the total lack of context within which we and they struggle to make sense of the briefs we receive and respond to is at the root cause of our lack of ability to change.
I also feel a particularly sad parallel in this when we perceive certain (perhaps the more enlightened) of our clients to be battling without hope, rudderless. I guess we can most definitely sympathize with so much of this ‘postmodernism’ or lack of individuality and hope in our own lives today.
David continues in an effort to explain why we all aim (aimlessly) to control everything, therefore…
“First, contemporary capitalism’s hyper-flexible methods of producing wealth have sharply compressed our conceptions of time and space: we expect things to happen faster, and we perceive our reach across geographic space as greatly extended. Second, capitalism is simultaneously caught in a recurring crisis of over-accumulation: it generates wealth so successfully that it tends to produce too much stuff for the economy’s level of demand.”
“The first of these processes can help solve the problems created by the second. As time is compressed, the turnover rate of capital rises, and new tastes and consumption patterns arise and disappear more quickly, which boosts demand. Similarly, as space is compressed, new markets become available, and excess capital can be spread across larger regions”.
“Capitalism thus solves the problem of over-accumulation by creating an ever more quickly shifting kaleidoscope of ‘wants’ and ‘needs’ across an ever wider geographical space. But this hyperactivity produces fragments and ephemera. Time compression rams together the past, present and future; and it chops our temporal reality into small segments, as one orchestrated consumer fad follows another in ever more rapid succession”.
“Space compression jumbles together the world’s diverse cultures; they bump against and overlap one another in bewildering confusion. Since many of these cultures can’t easily coexist in the world marketplace, capitalism tends to strip away their essential characteristics, leaving only the faintest and most innocuous cultural afterimages. The result can easily be an endless changing postmodernist collage of production and consumption, of rootless images and motifs”.
So are we dealing with a postmodernist business reality? Leaving the word aside does the reality for some look a bit like this?
“I can’t use anything from history unless it smacks me in the face or I’m absolutely forced to. It’s all too complex anyway and I don’t really understand all the systems. And anyway when I use anything from the past I am going to change my story create a new version, new accounts, variety of product, service, re-set objective beyond any worthwhile recognition to suit my current financial requirements and everyone else had better just fit in”
“We can probably fool enough people most of the time and it will all be different tomorrow anyway so there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Who cares if the total effect doesn’t look very nice if we’re making lots of money: It’s tough. My working colleagues don’t matter either because life’s tough enough without having to worry about everyone. They can look after themselves".
Recognition of the importance of changing this rather extreme position rams home to me daily but one example that went straight to the point was as follows. Michael Rosen, the teacher of business management who wrote about Black Monday, the ‘near miss’ total destruction of the American Stock market and potentially therefore the end of the world as we know it, in 1987, said this about what is really going on.
“That which appears objective- the naturalness of organizations, the structuring of hierarchies, the immutability of economic laws, the stability of order- is illusory, where fronts are maintained through the management of back-stages of meaning. Nevertheless, at times disorder raises its head, the mask of everydayness fades, we peer over the edge into the abyss of uncharted terror”.
I am saying then that its against this complex background that we look towards the boards, to the drivers of these commercial enterprises; the management units, the political organizations which purport to run our lives, these worthy fellows we call our clients and all those with whom we could improve and re-shape our existence.
And if that’s what we really want to do then we have to look for the winners, the changers, the brave and courageous and to ourselves to find out who will stand up and be counted and to identify them as quickly as we can.
We need to properly realize the power we have as objective experts to be allowed into this space. We are now sitting at the same table and are privy to the innermost confessions and skeletons, the secrets, the politics, the shortcomings and the misgivings beginning to be exposed.
We have to know where we stand because without that precision we will almost certainly not know quite when we are about to fall.
We need to have a fully developed sense of vision: ‘360-degree’ vision. The Economist stated once that: “Complexity creates confusion; uncertainty creates fear and both create a booming demand for outside advice.” Does that mean consultants? Oh dear.
My own view though is that the model for advisors and consultants, agencies and contractors is fatally flawed. Every organization has its own agenda, every organization has its own expertise and every individual request for any kind of tender results in a feeding frenzy of subjective justification.
Advisors are always conveniently referring to sets of data and prejudice and in the worst cases this advice purely serves to ‘feed’ the most profitable ‘products’ or service that that organization just happens to have in abundance. Funny that.
This is true of many management consultancies, systems consultants, change management experts, accounting firms, marketing advisors and agencies. There are traditions and long term reasons for this which are easy to spot and perhaps even to understand but traditions and reasons I fear they will not be able to defend for too much longer. What's your view?....
First posted on the Group Partners discussion forum, 3 November 2002. See the copy in the Wayback Machine. Kept as John wrote it.
More from What we were saying back then