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Amid these challenging times of great upheaval and expansion into our authentic selves, we are simultaneously witnessing the metamorphosis of humanity, within our organisations, communities and wider society. Organisations need to undergo a fundamental transformation today for two reasons: to adapt to an ever more complex global market; and to become ecologically regenerative. This is where a ‘systems view of life’ can provide important conceptual skills and tools to navigate the changes.
As COVID-shocks erode the edifices of normality, underlying systemic fragility becomes easier to see. It’s not just COVID, or draconian mandates, mushrooming global debt, imploding property values, monstrous market volatility, rising mental illness, soaring suicide rates, or the millions of people betrayed by their employers and suddenly jobless or even homeless. It’s all of these combined, and so much more. Such levels of stress in all systems create a pivotal moment where we can either adapt and evolve out of this breakdown, or hold on to the crumbling status quo to inevitably be crushed as the tower falls. It’s a supreme moment in our human history!
It is far too late to save the status quo – even if we wanted to. After all, evolution is all about evolving through these transformative periods of breakdown with break-through. Are you up for evolution? Scientists have long realised that evolution experiences fits and starts, with relatively long periods of steady-state incremental change, and then significant shifts of breakdown leading to breakthrough. This is known as ‘punctuated evolution’, and it’s how life on Earth adapts and evolves. Breakthrough involves a shift from status quo thinking. You are being called to reach beyond your current bubble into a deeper and wider worldview, where humanity will evolve. This breakthrough moment can be a time of immense innovation, not just at the product/service or business model level, or structural ways of working, but in terms of our worldview, of how we perceive ourselves, and our sense of place and purpose in the world – a shift in consciousness.
“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
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Whether it’s the rapid shift to digital ways of working, the rising demand for authentic leadership, the increasing interest in agile purposeful organisational cultures, or the need for people to gain coherence and focus amid distraction, the blurring of home/work-life, or rising stress levels, the desire for a complete root-and-branch system transformation of how and why we do things is happening now. The danger of being distracted by the noise of breakdown is the inability to hear the resonant melody of breakthrough beckoning us beyond system collapses into new ways of thinking, and new ways of perceiving. Necessity is the Mother of all inventions!
It’s time to reinvent our humanity.
We are being prodded, cajoled, shaken from our status quo slumber so that we can awaken a deeper perception beyond our current bubble. We are in need of reinventing not just our products, organisations, political institutions, economics, urban planning, education, and health systems – but all of it and more! This tumultuous time invites us to reinvent our purpose, to re-find, renew and reconnect with what it truly means to be human. What an epic time to be a leader! So much of what we thought we knew is open for question and reinvention.
“When she transformed into a butterfly, the caterpillars spoke not of her beauty, but of her weirdness. They wanted her to change back into what she always had been. But she had wings.”
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Systems science teaches us that living systems continually regenerate themselves by transforming or replacing their components. They undergo continual structural changes while preserving their web-like patterns of organisation. Understanding life means understanding its inherent change processes. Once we have that level of understanding, we can begin to design processes of organisational change accordingly. In this way, we will create human organisations that mirror life’s adaptability, diversity, and creativity. For any lasting system change, we must open up to the real ‘Logic of Life’ with humility and courage.
Systems scientist Donella Meadows researches system interventions. She has observed that the highest leverage point at which to intervene in a system is the worldview/mindset out of which the system arises. Unless we address today’s dominant yet outdated worldview and the leadership logic that flows from it, then all our best endeavours for new ways of working and more sustainable, ethical, and inclusive business models will be short-lived. When a business announces that it will cut carbon emissions by 50% in the next three years, what it is really saying is that it will harm the environment less. A more accurate way to think about these business efforts is that they are only slowing the rate of unsustainability. This must not be confused with making a positive impact. Doing ‘less bad’ is not doing good, by which we mean creating economic prosperity, improving wellbeing, and contributing to a regenerative natural environment. Shifting business strategies from doing less harm to strategies that create flourishing for all life requires a root-and-branch system transformation in how we perceive the organisation and its purpose, and how we perceive ourselves and our purpose.
It is a shift in our worldview.
“Having a dream is like having sunshine. Without it, you cannot see as clear. With it, your world shines. Have a dream, and the light will fill your eyes with hope.”
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When you think of your organisation and the challenges you currently face, where do your thoughts take you? Your mind may be drawn to thoughts of increasing revenues, reducing expenses or even improving services to customers. If you are like most business leaders, you may even think further about how to implement these kinds of objectives. You are probably thinking in terms of how you can get more with what you have (or less). How you can maximise the efficiency of your organisation?
If this is where your thinking goes, then it is enmeshed in the Machine Paradigm.
Machines perform better when optimised for efficiency. The responsibility for optimising the organisational machine has become management’s domain and their primary concern. This mechanistic logic coupled with economies of scale, centralisation, and control-based thinking, led to the hierarchical organisation structure with its silos and bureaucracy. Employees were relegated to the role of efficiently performing the duties as defined by management. As management seeks to improve the efficiency of the machine, they unwittingly undermine the creativity, agility and empowerment of people in the process. Taken to extremes, we end up with a small group of unelected narcissistic oligarchs making decisions to enslave the rest of the globe.
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
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Meeting in the shadows of the COP26 gathering in Glasgow, Scotland, the captains of private finance laid out their plans to restructure the global financial system. The plan is to reconfigure the role and scope of global and regional financial institutions, including the World Bank and IMF. The official cover story presents this massive transformation as a unified transition to a global (carbon) “net zero” economy. This new arrangement will totally change “global financial governance.” By further weakening national sovereignty by forcing nation states to follow new rules that favour wealthy alliance members for their benefit – all under the guise of promoting fake United Nations “sustainability goals.” We have already seen this power-grab progression expressed in the global lockdowns, surveillance systems development via the 5G/6G rollout in “Smart Cities” around the world. That was the appetiser. This is the entrée.
Whitney Webb has written a comprehensive analysis of the meeting, the plan, and its implications for all living things on this little planet of ours. “This alliance, called the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), was launched in April by John Kerry, US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Change; Janet Yellen, US Secretary of the Treasury and former chair of the Federal Reserve; and Mark Carney, UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance and former chair of the Bank of England and Bank of Canada. Carney, who is also the UK prime minister’s Finance Advisor for the COP26 conference, currently co-chairs the alliance with US billionaire and former mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg. Although the GFANZ has cloaked itself in the lofty rhetoric of “saving the planet,” its plans ultimately amount to a corporate-led coup that will make the global financial system even more corrupt and predatory. This will further reduce the sovereignty of national governments in the developing world.”
“The truth is, one who seeks to achieve freedom by petitioning those in power to give it to him has already failed, regardless of the response. To beg for the blessing of “authority” is to accept that the choice is the master’s alone to make, which means that the person is already, by definition, a slave.”
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And here’s how “the mechanics” of this diabolical plan will work. If you thought multi-national development banks like the IMF and World Bank were uses as weapons against small, emerging economies in the global South before, this is the “nuclear” financial option enveloping (enclosure) every aspect of every penny invested in once sovereign nations. “In addition to the creation of “corporatist” “country platforms” that focus on specific areas and/or issues in the developing world, GFANZ aims to also further “corporatise” multilateral development banks (MDBs) and development finance institutions (DFIs) in order to better fulfill the investment goals of alliance members.
Per the alliance, this is described as increasing “MDB-private sector collaboration.” The GFANZ report notes that “MDBs play a critical role in helping to grow investment flows” in the developing world. MDBs, like the World Bank, have long been criticised for accomplishing this task by trapping developing nations in debt and then using that debt to force those nations to deregulate markets (specifically financial markets), privatise state assets and implement unpopular austerity policies. The GFANZ report makes it clear that the alliance now seeks to use these same, controversial tactics of MDBs by forcing even greater deregulation on developing countries to facilitate “green” investments from alliance members.”
“It seems that our brave new world is becoming less tolerant,
spiritual, and educated than it ever was when I was young.”
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Whitney Webb has laid it all out and we urge readers to take full advantage of her research. In order to fully appreciate the broader implications of the Covid scam, it is essential to understand the importance of this ultimate merger (corporatisation) of MDBs and the unimaginable deregulation that comes under the frame and narrative of “decarbonisation.” Climate change is the “big enchilada” in this global takeover scheme. This is not the time to sit back and leave it up to our heavily compromised politicians and policymakers. If you care about your future and the future of humanity, you will step up and be the leader. You will pull your head out of the sand and arm yourself with the information you need to know, and you will broaden your worldview to elevate the game away from these parasites, intent on owning and controlling everything and everyone.
Peter Drucker once said, ‘In times of turmoil, the danger lies not in the turmoil, but in facing it with yesterday’s logic.’ Frequently attempts to achieve well-intended solutions apply the very logic that created the problems. The new spirit of business, politics and socio-economics must be rooted in a new logic that transcends this illusion. By stimulating this new rationale, we liberate ourselves from the restrictions of the self-limiting mind-set that originally created the problems, enabling a shift to occur: from egotism to empathy; from separation to synchronicity; from power over to power with; from fear to courage. This shift enables new ways of leading, focusing on facilitating a learning environment where we can develop our capacity to become authentic co-creators within a life-affirming future.
“Everything in the world could be found in the points of contact between them: all the ins and outs of the tides, the pulsations of stars in the sky, and the running of wolves across the cold north – all part of the same rhythm.”
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The Participatory Worldview of Interconnectedness began in the 20th Century with Quantum Theory and was strengthened through new scientific explorations such as Depth Psychology, Facilitation Ecology, Complexity Theory, and General Systems Theory. Scientific discoveries at the micro-biological, ecological, psychological, and sociological levels shed light on the participatory and relational nature of life. The human mind began to be seen as reverberating within an interdependent interconnected world. We learned that our inner psychological wellbeing influences and is influenced by the outer world. How we relate to the world through right thought and right action affects our ability to flourish at individual and collective levels. The acquisition of knowledge is now seen as participatory, collaborative, and relational.
When we elevate to the new paradigm, we start to realise that the organisation is not actually a machine, it is an emergent adaptive system that is continuously sensing and responding to its ever-changing environment. We can still utilise machine logic when project managing, measuring and monitoring, yet we are not limited by this analytical type of knowledge acquisition. Instead we are free to attune to the relational flows and emergence that enliven or stifle the organisation as it adapts and evolves. As we perceive this living organisation, we also begin to see that it thrives by enlivening all its stakeholders and creating flourishing futures for all life. We regain our sense of purpose as stewards of life on Earth, not plunderers. We start to create the space to heal ourselves and feel more connected again to real life.
“Markets change, visions change, technologies change, teams change, settings change, relationships change… with an ever-changing environment it will be naive to think that you can draw the future with a straight line.”
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It is here that we open up new vistas beyond the constraints of mechanistic logic. This shift in worldview transforms underlying beliefs and informs values we live and lead by. And so enters a new kind of leader – the ‘systems leader’ or Conscious Regenerative Leader who can sense the participatory and systemic nature of their organisation and wider ecosystems. We are drawn to Nature in our search for forms of production and service provision that could serve as a fresh model for the next evolution of the organisation. Nature is alive, resilient, creative and agile in the way it responds to the changing landscape. Nature co-creates and participates within an interrelated ecosystem. Everything involved in Nature’s processes – from cells to complex living systems – are engaged in the process. The organisation’s correlation is that the individuals, teams, and diverse stakeholders all form part of the over-arching, emerging ecosystem within an ever-changing context.
We can perceive the organisation as having an ‘inner’ dimension where employees contribute to the health and vitality of the organisational culture through their empowered capacity to bring more of themselves to work, to be creative and collaborative, and to trust each other. And we can perceive the organisation’s ‘outer’ dimension where all stakeholders, including customer, suppliers, investors, communities, the natural environment, etc. form part of a healthy vibrant ecosystem where all relations interweave and participate towards life-affirming futures. The inner and outer inform each other.
“It’s only after you’ve stepped outside your comfort zone
that you begin to change, grow, and transform.”
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Coming to work, whether on zoom or in the office, invites people to unlock their brilliance, work with their own tensions and learning edges, and contribute to a brighter future for themselves, their fellow employees and all stakeholders including society and the environment. Purpose and values are lived not just espoused. This is rooted in a worldview shift, and not plastered on like a Band-Aid to an old mindset. This is a profound shift in our perspective; one that will take us from optimising the machine for efficiency through command-and-control and hierarchic power structures to optimising the flow of energy through empowerment, empathy, communication and co-creativity. We shift from reductive logic to relational logic and begin to treat the organisation as a living system rather than as a machine.
Like all paradigm shifts, this shift does not come easy. It requires us to radically rethink and redesign how and why we do things across all levels of business from our organisational sense of purpose to how we make day-to-day decisions. It goes beyond simply optimising the machine into an exploration of how we best empower a collective of people to create extraordinary impact. This shift in perspective opens up our perceptual horizon to see beyond the box, silo and machine and sense into the relational nature inherent within life. We don’t need their fake ‘green’ plan because we see Nature and our organisation’s place in it, as it really is, an inter-relational matrix of energy. Within this matrix, our organisations express coherent purposeful energetic systems of value-creation and delivery through these relationships.
“To really change the world, we have to help people change the way they see things. Global betterment is a mental process, not one that requires huge sums of money or a high level of authority. Change has to be psychological.”
— Suzy Kassem
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