“After so many years of defending ourselves against life and searching for better controls, we sit exhausted in the unyielding structures of organization we’ve created, wondering what happened. What happened to effectiveness, to creativity, to meaning? What happened to us? Trying to get these structures to change becomes the challenge of our lives. We draw their futures and design them into clearly better forms. We push them, we prod them. We try fear, we try enticement. We collect tools, we study techniques. We use everything we know and end up nowhere. What happened?
Yet it is only our worldview that dooms us to this incompetence. This world that we seek to control so carefully is a world we have created. We created it by what we chose to notice, by the images we used to describe what we were seeing. It was we who decided that the world was a great machine propelled by external energies. It was we who perceived the creativity of life as a dire threat. We saw life in motion and called it uncontrollable. We saw life’s unceasing desires for discovery-we say the dance-and called it disruptive..
Yet out beyond the shadows of our old thinking, a wholly different world appears. […] A world that welcomes and supports our endeavors. The world knows how to grow and change. It has been doing so for billions of years. Life knows how to create systems. Life knows how to create greater capacity. Life knows how to discover meaning. The motions that we sought to wrestle from life’s control are available to us to support our desires if we can stop being so afraid.” (Wheatley & Kellner-Rogers, 1996)
Our organizations arise out of our perspectives, which give rise to our deepest psychological beliefs and values. Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers insightfully observe that the impulse to control arises from fear and distrust (ultimately, of the world and other people). Yet, by now it’s generally become clear that centralized, bureaucratic organizations (whether they be businesses or governments) are unable to respond rapidly enough to changing conditions.
It seems to be human nature that, the more fearful we are, the tighter we hold the reins of control, and the more resistant we will be to change. Yet, if environmental conditions have truly changed, change may be what we most need to survive.
How do we break out of this vicious cycle? Wheatley & Kellner-Rogers describe a perspective of trust. Is that “realistic”?
In the next post, we will look at this organizational “wheel of fear” and some strategies for replacing it with an organizational “wheel of freedom” (Britton, 2001).
Britton, Rhonda. (2001). Fearless Living. NY: Penguin.
[…] my last post, http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2008/05/16/trust-as-an-enabler-of-change/ we talked about how fear can both prompt and frustrate change. Presently, macro forces, […]