3 lessons from ancestral cultures for our world searching for meaning
On 9 April, Makeba Chamry (founder of Swaan) spoke at a conference held at Le Plateau on the topic of “From first peoples to the digital era”.
In a world facing major technological upheavals, it is important for companies to establish roots, a base, a reason to be sustainable, a solid basis supporting reinvention.
Fortunately, the ancestral cultures of first peoples — wisdom overshadowed by scientific and technological progress — can teach us something that is still relevant today.
We’re not talking about glorifying the past, but asking how it can be reinvented within 21st century companies at a time of intimidating acceleration, continual transformations and general disillusionment.
The foundations of these practices being rituals and rites of passage, what lessons can be learned for today’s leaders searching for meaning?
1. Cultivate ties with your inner self
In 2012, Google launched Project Aristotle, a study that sought to identify the models and general principles behind the most efficient teams.
The most important element was revealed to be psychological safety, where everyone feels safe expressing themselves and taking risks without fear of recrimination from a leader.
The Kogi people have been doing this for 4,000 years!
The Kogi, a semi-nomadic people of Colombia, live in a tough and sometimes violent environment, having lost much of their land. Nevertheless, they are a mild-mannered people as a result of intense work undertaken on their inner selves from a very young age.
They learn how to control this impulse, these emotions, that overwhelm us when we haven’t worked on them.
They have designated areas and times, practices to enable them to emerge and people to work with them. They say you can’t play in tune if an instrument is out of tune. This inner work ensures a harmonious relationship with the outside world.
« This psychological safety setting where everyone can show their emotions, expose their vulnerability and be accepted for who they are allows people to share their confidence, share their ideas and boost their creativity. »
2. Cultivate ties with others
In most first people cultures, the number 2 is of paramount importance!
For them, 2 represents movement, creation. It is associated with the creation of life on Earth.
The Maasai, livestock farmers of Kenya and northern Tanzania, for example, only travel in pairs. It symbolises the idea that the other is an extension of the self, that we’re not separate, that there are always two sides to us.
This dichotomy is also found in other cultures, like in China with the Yin and the Yang, this alternating of light and darkness we have to live with. There is not just one road to follow. By accepting this otherness, we need to find our right balance between these two permanently-conflicting aspects.
In the West, we focus more on assertiveness.
Although there are too few these days, there are still rituals where we open up to others (saying hello, having coffee together, etc.) but we no longer inhabit these rituals!
Makeba warns us of the risk of transforming a ritual into a process in the corporate world. It shouldn’t be exploited, she says, but should rather participate in emergence and co-creation.
« A ritual has to remain free! It must be a deep-felt and driven gesture. It is not another managerial tool. »
3. Cultivate ties with the living world
First peoples feel completely involved in this living world dynamic. In western cultures, we’ve chosen to move away from this connection. We study it, we copy it, but we don’t immerse ourselves within it.
We therefore forget to give a second thought to an essential part of existence, the part that is within us, human ecology.
Conclusion
In the digital and artificial intelligence era, we need to work on these 3 aspects simultaneously because we have a substantial responsibility faced with the power of algorithms and we need to rediscover this wisdom within us via rituals and rites of passage inspired by first peoples to put the living world back into our organisations and mark the key stages of our transformation.
The full meeting is available on YouTube :
#LePlateau is a third place dedicated to Open Innovation within Societe Generale. It’s a 1,000m² space that hosts, under one roof and for periods of up to 6 months, Societe Generale teams and ecosystem start-ups. Each resident works on their own disruptive or innovative project in large open spaces where teams commingle. #LePlateau provides an environment enabling this work to be undertaken in a single place, but also and more importantly methodological support to accelerate projects, the organising of the residents and premises to enable them to exchange and share their expertise and experience.
