A Tentative Manifesto for the Future of Organizations — 1
This is work in progress, an exploration of possibilities. This is the work of communities. I’m just hoping to stir some thoughts and start some dialogues…
I could have also named the article “A Tentative Manifesto for Organization of the Future.” I chose to name it the way I did because I believe that the very future of organizations rests on re-imagining their foundational narratives, their raison d’être.
Maybe decades from now, existing humans will look back at this period of human civilization and organizational trajectory in bewildered astonishment and horror.
They will see uber-tech infused mega-multinational organizations more powerful than nation-states abysmally stuck in Industrial Era norms even as the world crashed around them. They will see organizations still focused on shareholder profit, short-term growth, and vicious cycles of competition and acquisition even when they proved futile. They will see organizations willfully and deliberately bypassing, misusing, and changing policies and regulatory laws to aid obscene wealth accumulation for a few at the cost of the Planet and Life. They will see organizations with all the knowledge and know-how at their fingertips still hooked to an obsolete narrative. And the citizens of the new era will wonder at the stupidity, greed, and absolute narcissism that must have driven these deranged behaviors.
But I’m still hopeful. Although it’s diminishing rapidly. Maybe, just maybe, there will arise organizations and leaders who can step off this treadmill of Derangement and Destruction. Maybe, they will not give into the futility and folly of perpetual profit and doomed productivity — all aimed to feed a vicious cycle of consumerization and accumulation even as the planet is ravaged by floods, fires, and furies of human creation.
I call such organizations that dare to step off the treadmill of destruction, Wayfinders*. These organizations have the power to create ‘islands of sanity’ in the midst of the madness induced by a lust for power, privilege, and profit. I believe organizations have the power to reimagine our civilizational narratives. They are communities and ecosystems — places where individuals come together to express and explore their fullest potential, and bring their deepest gifts in service to a larger Evolutionary Purpose. They can be:
Islands of sanity (phrase used by Margaret Wheatley in Who do We Choose to Be)
Imaginal cells for the future
Intentional communities of sensemaking
Containers of possibilities and potentials
Sacred holding spaces for dialogue and emergence
Profoundly relational spaces of co-creation
Harbingers of future citizenship
Movers and shapers of a regenerative planet
Truly GLOBAL SPACES of collaboration
If today multinational organizations have the power to shape national politics and define destinies of countries and their economies, tomorrow’s organizations can reshape and redefine too. Only in a direction vastly different from the current toxic forces.
Industrial era norms, exacerbated and propelled by the tyranny of technology, have completely run amok bringing life to a point of extinction. The Sixth Mass Extinction is staring us in the face. And we are headed towards an abyss at breakneck speed. Organizations as Wayfinders have to unhook themselves from the toxic paradigms of yore and create fundamentally different narratives for their raison d’étre.
Technology — arising from the same mindset of control, power, and growth — has become a destructive and degenerative force. The promises of tech utopia are long lost although technocrats won’t accept it. Instead of the promised democratization of information, we have a deluge of disinformation and misinformation, propaganda, and vicious, polarizing toxicity. Mega-platforms like Facebook and Twitter have become havens for trolls and propagandists. All sanity is lost. AI with all the hype and hoopla appears to be a threat to humanity. One can only wonder what use are these inventions and billions spent in research, if all we have are hate-inducing algorithms and surveillance capitalism? So much wasted. So much lost. Because those in power lost sight of what it meant to be alive on this Pale Blue Dot.
So, coming back to Wayfinders. What will such organizations look like, feel like, act like?
Honestly, I don’t know. No single individual can know. We can only collectively envision and draft some foundational narratives that will anchor these organizations. For the last few years, discussions and debates around Regenerative Organizations have become very popular. The thinking and collaboration are already happening. But I’d like to take this a step further.
At the root of today’s organizations is the narrative of endless growth, separation from nature, and hyper-individualism. These are different aspects of a cosmology and epistemology that is purely Eurocentric. This Eurocentric hegemonic narrative was propagated and imposed on the rest of the planet as an imperial project of colonization starting almost 500 years ago. This narrative gave rise to institutions and organizations, economies and polities, social structures and infrastructures that define nation-states today. Everything constructed under the ambit of this narrative was geared towards one objective — endless economic growth (read GDP) and accumulation at the cost of Life.
This hegemonic narrative is actually just an economic monomyth passing of as reality. It’s a construct cleverly sold through imperialism and colonization, and then through neoliberal capitalism in its various guises. Unfortunately, this construct has invaded all aspects of society from healthcare to education, from business to politics, from ecology to economy. And even religion and spirituality. It will take some deliberate undoing and unraveling. The good news is that it is already frayed and loose threads are showing through. They just need strong tugs and pulls to unravel.
The current dominant power enjoying the status quo won’t and can’t be a part of the unmasking and unraveling of the old narrative. But those in power are rapidly losing control. The planet is ensuring that. The time is ripe to unravel the old and weave new narratives from life-affirming paradigms.
Under the guise of scientific rationality and universalism, the narrative successfully delegitimized multitudes of ways of being, seeing, sensing, relating, and doing that abound in this wondrously diverse and pluriversal planet. The pluriversal was forcefully made ‘universal’ as a drive towards uniformity and conformity. Pluriversality is thus a decolonization of knowledge and being, and is essentially convivial and dialogical.
It is this dialogic capacity arising from relatedness that organizations inherently have as communities that must be reclaimed. For organizations to decolonize their imagination and become truly life-affirming, they have to re-invent and re-create their foundational narrative(s) from the ground up. There cannot be any bolt-on strategy towards regeneration and anti-fragility.
It is starkly evident that the old narrative has become actively toxic to life on this planet. And no amount of whitewashing, greenwashing, and bandaging are working. We have to recognize the toxicity of the mindset of colonialism that still pervades although officially countries are no longer ‘colonized’. The epistemology and ontology of the global North have been imposed on a pluriversal planet for way too long leading to not only ecocide and genocide but also epistemicide.
This monomyth arose from a reductionist and linear mindset characterized by five denials: 1) denial of nature, 2) denial of any limits, 3) denial of other worldviews, epistemologies, and ontologies, 4) denial of the sanctity of all beings, and 5) denial of our indelible interconnectedness with all of Life. The new narrative(s) of a pluriversal world that works for all will have to be woven from these unseen, unheard, unacknowledged voices and visions because that’s where our (all living beings which includes humans) redemption lies.
This requires a complete shift towards fearless imagining. This is where Wayfinders can pave the path. Organizations are not inert machines with human resources operating them. Organizations are living ecosystems of deep interrelatedness in a continuous and dynamic equilibrium with their environment. I see organizations not as pyramids of power hierarchy but fluid fractals of natural hierarchy. Just like form fits function in a forest or in animals, organizations’ forms flow with the function.
Anthropocentrism has to give way to Biocentrism (the view or belief that the rights and needs of humans are not more important than those of other living things). It’s time to live like other life forms — within our ecological boundaries with respectful deference to all sentient beings, with the knowledge of our own ignorance, and the humility to learn and adapt. If we wish to survive.
Technology, when thoughtfully and wisely deployed, can be a facilitator of such organizations. Today, technology has become a harmful addiction exploited by a few to manipulate and maneuver the planet at will. Think about it. What would you like technology to do for you?
Wayfinders have to go back to the basics. To the drawing board and to deep dialogues with all life form. I literally mean we have to learn from forests and rivers, oceans and mountains, birds and bees, beavers and bears. All the voices we chose to unsee. This is not utopia but the only survival manual I can think of. Janine Benyus put it beautifully when she tells us that the Earth has 3.8 billion years of learning to impart. We need to become learnable and worthy of the lessons being taught.
Wayfinders will operate from essentially different paradigms — beyond the trivialities of GDP, shareholders profit, and endless efficiency. The paradigms will stem from wellbeing. Not human wellbeing but that of all sentient beings. They will shift from a human-centered design to life-affirming design and purpose.
To be continued…
*The anthropologist Wade Davis coined the word “wayfinder” to describe the ancient navigators who first discovered the Pacific Islands, guiding small boats across vast stretches of open water to patches of land so small they make needles in haystack look like anvils in breadboxes — all without modern navigation equipment. ~from Finding Your Way in a Wild New World by Marth Beck
