The Hindu Business Line : Shaping the future with insight

IT would be futile not to acknowledge in this first instalment of the column now entering its third year that 2005 could not have begun on a more sombre note. Neither can we pretend that it would be business as usual soon, which is my excuse, if you will, for a somewhat unconventional theme for this piece. The Yuletide spirit was well and truly washed away by the raging waters into a tidal wave of misery; and the horrific pictures of global suffering on a scale unprecedented in living memory, which have been with us day and night since Boxing Day, have left many of us limp with exhaustion. It may be news that markets and economies are increasingly becoming interlinked and global. The human condition has always been global, and so too Nature.

The calamity has also awakened in people from diverse backgrounds the same sense that the human condition is more classless, colour-free, seamless and shared than might have been imagined. While there is an outpouring of emotion, sympathy and help of all kinds for the tsunami victims, it has occurred to many that there is somehow, somewhere, a lesson in this for all of us, but no one quite knows what it is. The words of Colin Powell, a seasoned soldier and a mature diplomat, after visiting the scene in Aceh, were eloquently brief — he had not seen anything like this in all his experience. And that, of course, includes war.

Besides the sharing of at least scientific data, a greater level of compassion is certainly called for, if not money and other assistance, across the globe on a vast scale. More importantly, this has to happen on a sustained basis and without the trigger of a tragedy. As indeed some observers have pointed out, full reconstruction and rehabilitation in some areas could take up to a decade. Ecologists have also warned that some things will never be the same again. It is abundantly clear that we should enlist the power of money that resides in the large global entities, whether they be the mega companies, charities, the World Bank or the UN agencies. We must also harness the power of science and technology in intelligently interpreting the likely impact of such natural events, and forewarning is a start. The recent interest in discovering the merits of doing business with the bottom-of-the-pyramid customers (no longer referred to simply as the poor) is another index of the times. Tragedy is always sad, but poverty and deprivation makes it more poignantly so. The responsibility (in the literal sense of ability to respond) thus goes beyond the realms of any agency or segment of society, be it socially aware corporations, NGOs or Governments.

Which is a good point for us to consider an extraordinary development, taking place unobtrusively amongst thought leaders in management and organisations, in the past few years. A brilliant example of this is a recent book Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future co-authored by Peter Senge of MIT (with Otto Scharmer, Jo Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers) and published by its own sponsoring organisation, The Society for Organisational Learning, Cambridge MA, USA. The book's focus is the role of learning and the betterment of the human condition and it achieves this by a cross-pollination of ideas, insights and experiential knowledge gained from several fields including Taoist philosophy, physics, transpersonal psychology and, of course, the great spiritual sages. It joins the chorus of profound thinkers through the ages to ask: "What will make Man change? When will he ever learn?" Clearly if these questions are not answered, the assumptions of management education and organisational strategies are of no value whatsoever, for the limits of what actually happens — what people manage to implement — the circumscribed by what they have assimilated from their experience and the extent to which they are more open to learning something that challenges the mental models they have inherited. This book may well come to mark an epoch. It is not often that a management guru of the stature of Peter Senge, who gave us the Fifth Discipline and "learning organisations," would be heard to say: "The fundamental problem with most businesses is that they're governed by mediocre ideas. Maximising the return on invested capital is an example.."

Senge goes on to make a distinction between good ideas and governing ideas, those notions and beliefs that are internalised within an organisation and so drive individual and group behaviours. He clarifies that this calls for a deeper level learning than the usual one of control systems and information with which we seek to manage our organisations today. This is not a mere speculative prescription.

There is an amazing case study of an entirely new way of perceiving in the development of Visa, an institution that embodied a new way of looking at transactions. It was not a credit card company or a bank but a system of exchange owned by its subscribers and sponsors. The authors call it an instance of a purpose ("a clear simple statement of intent") and principles or "how the whole and all the parts intend to conduct themselves in pursuit of that purpose." Dee Hock, one of the founders behind Visa, says that the insight came to him lying awake one night after weeks of tortuous negotiations and debate. It was born out of a deep immersion (which they call sensing) in the chaos that the payment systems of the credit card industry were leading to huge losses due to poor collections, fraud and inefficiency, in the days before computerisation. From sensing the near-impossible predicament came a deeper perception `a surrendering to a commitment' that sounds almost mystic — except that it comes from a businessman! "I knew that no bank could create the world's premier system for exchange of value, no nation state would ... but what if a fraction of the resources and a fraction of the ingenuity of all the people involved could be applied?" It was as he says "beyond the power of reason" to design such an organisation if such reason took pursuit of individual self-interest for granted as the supreme motive. On the other hand, if people could suspend their beliefs about self-interest and serve an emergent whole, then a new form of organisation could indeed be born.

Visa is a network, not a conventional, hierarchical stockholder corporate form of organisation. It took its guiding principles from the biological and not the physical sciences. It therefore succeeded in organic and gradual morphing into something alive and capable of learning — instead of a modular machine. The book's authors fully support the view (which the writer has been drawn to for some years) that networks and relationships are more fundamental than things; that physical sciences are a poor model for life; and that the inherent fragmentation in thought will always prevent holistic thinking which is so essential to resolving the global issues that confront us — and will not go away. Reverting to the theme of natural disasters, a senior official at the UN is quoted as saying "If the gap between our power and our wisdom is not redressed soon, I don't have much hope for our prospects," a conclusion that needs no further research evidence in support than a look at the headlines of any newspaper. For instance, the interconnectedness of phenomena is another scientifically established fact, accepted by the leaders of post-quantum physics and biology, but which has not yet begun to inspire the thinking of organisational leaders in any section of society. David Bohm, a former colleague of Einstein and hailed as his intellectual heir, said in an interview with the authors that the most important challenge facing modern society is to "break the boundaries between people so that we can operate as a single intelligence" which is in a sense a return to our natural state. So much for our being an enlightened society!

Even synchronicity and the so-called coincidence are given scientific explanations through the mind-blowing theory of non-locality expounded by J. S. Bell, whose experiments suggest a communication between atoms across the globe that cannot be explained by the known notions of cause and effect. Rupert Sheldrake is another scientist whose research suggests that there is an instantaneous communication and learning among species across the world that defies known categories of information and knowledge transfer. The organisation developed by Senge and others called Global Leadership Initiative seriously suggests that the next stage in our evolution is towards organisations that transcend the selfishness paradigm, tapping into an emerging consensus that firms must not, indeed cannot, act as if they stand apart from society.

Naturally the book would run the risk of being challenged by all the votaries of a reductionist way of thinking who are still wedded to the notion of measurement and technology-led thought as superior instruments of human civilisation. Indeed they are — without them we will not have satellites or cyclone warning systems; but without a holistic perception of humanity and a wiser, compassionate, understanding of the true self interest of all of humanity, we may fail in the way we use (or abuse) such brilliant technical expertise. Consider the recent uncontested revelation that even the pledges of aid made in times of great distress are not actually carried out by national governments, but quietly allowed to lapse once the events fade away from the front pages. No more sorry commentary is needed to show that we humans as a community have a long way to go yet.

(The author is a student and observer of markets, people and organisations.)

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