On a Sunday morning in Salado, Texas, four years ago, I was to give one of the concluding addresses at a conference devoted to the subject of evil. I decided that I wanted to give the audience the good news that through community building we now had the technology, the know-how, to exorcise our institutions. So I knew I would be addressing something akin to 'Utopia construction.' Beyond that, however, I had deliberately not prepared my remarks any further because I wanted to hear first what the other speakers had to say.
Lily and I pulled into town late Thursday night. The conference was to begin on Friday evening. Friday afternoon I took a nap from which I awoke with one of those rare, revelatory dreams that occasionally slaps me awake-that Carl Jung used to refer to as a 'big dream.' It was my first and only Star Trek dream.
In it, I was a cultural anthropologist who had been hopping around the galaxy examining a number of different planetary societies. With considerable forethought I had saved the best for last: a distant society that, from my home planet and scholarly position, had seemed on paper to be ideally designed, a very probable Utopia. When I finally got there, however, I discovered that this society was no better or no worse than that of any of the other clearly inadequate and defective cultures I had visited. My disappointment was intense. I awoke from this dream screaming at my local guide in frustration, 'But I had assumed that on this planet the Laws of Serendipity would hold true as they do everywhere else.'
The dream-this gift-focused with exquisite clarity upon an issue that desperately needed to be addressed. The topic of `social engineering' had already been touched upon twice in the conference before I spoke. I began my speech by recounting the dream. The moral of it, I explained, is that 'There is no question in my mind that we are called to build Utopia, but if we think we can do it solely by our design, we are sadly mistaken. We can do it only in cooperation with the grace of God. Any attempt at radical "social engineering" that does not incorporate God, that does not welcome grace and leave vast room for divine intervention, will utterly fail.' I was then able to go on to specify how the `technology' of community building succeeds, in part, precisely because it takes God into mind, depends upon her, and deliberately produces space for the Holy Spirit to do her thing.
I am profoundly aware of how strange these words must sound to most executives. Even those who are deeply and personally religious, who have had considerable experience with letting God into their own individual lives, have in all probability never even thought of what it would be like to let God into their organizations. But there is no other way for me to talk about it. Uneasy over how to communicate with the hardheaded, intensely practical business world, FCE (the Foundation for Community Encouragement) for several years struggled to develop some sort of marketing language that would not have to use such words as 'God' or 'love.' Eventually we gave up. We have to call a spade a spade.
And then we grow almost incoherent when asked, 'Well, what does it look like when God comes into an organization?' The answer is that nothing changes and everything changes. It is the sort of mystical response of Zen Buddhist language. 'Before I was enlightened,' one Zen master explained, `the mountains looked like mountains and the rivers like rivers. At the moment of enlightenment I saw it all differently. And now that I am enlightened, the mountains look like mountains again and the rivers like rivers.' Or, when asked what it was like to be enlightened, another Zen master answered, 'I chop wood and carry water.'
If you build community and let God into your organization, on the outside it will look pretty much the same. You will probably continue to have exactly the same organizational structure. You will continue to chop wood and carry water. There will be the same sorts of budgets and inventories and action plans and deadlines. But on the inside it will all be different. There will be a different spirit. There will be more spirit. It will be more alive.
So you need not be the least bit threatened by any radical change in titles, positions, lines of authority, or other structure for reasons that have already been elaborated. There is only one thing threatening about introducing community into your organization: a loss of control of certain outcomes. You won't lose control of 'bottom line' outcomes, such as profitability or fiscal accountability. Community is utterly realistic and would never lose sight of such things. But other 'things' will no longer be so predictable.
There is a common, perfectly human and understandable 'business mentality' that immediately focuses on outcomes. Natural though it may be, it causes considerable grief to FCE as it attempts to market its services to organizations. 'If I and my top management team do one of your community building workshops,' executives ask, 'what will be the outcomes?'
'We don't know,' FCE must reply.
'You don't know?' The questioner is aghast.
'No. Community is an adventure. We never can predict what will happen when a group becomes authentic and open to the Spirit. It's full of surprises. Thank God, because while the outcomes are usually quite different from what we imagined, they are often far better than we could have dreamed.'
By way of illustration, recall two examples from the preceding chapters. The labor-management team wanted some assurance they wouldn't cry or talk about God. FCE wouldn't give them that assurance, but they were satisfied on learning such behavior wasn't mandatory. Then shortly after the workshop began they were crying and speaking of God-the two outcomes they wanted to avoid. Neither they nor FCE could have predicted the ultimate outcome that Epiphany they would so boldly and thoroughly revolutionize their way of working together. But what a salutary outcome it was!
The other was the example of failure. That workshop failed because the vice-president for marketing was so unwilling to be open to unpredictable outcomes. He was terrified of what might happen were the group to open talk about their corporate culture. Had he allowed it, I suspect the outcome would have been as salutary as it was for the labor-management teams. But he couldn't allow it He couldn't give up that much control.
Community, within certain parameters, 'lets it happen.' This voluntary loss of control (or emptiness) feels scary at first, but the outcome is freedom and creativity. And God. Unexpected creativity. Unforeseen genius.
Remember the definition of serendipity as 'the gift of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.' It is, by definition, an unanticipated outcome. Recently a woman who had just undergone a religious conversion wrote to me saying that she wanted to 'learn grace-management skills.' I. had to laugh, since on one level the basic grace-management skill is the skill of non-management. You do not manage grace; you let it manage you. Actually, however, she was not entirely off base. There are grace-management skills. They are the skills of attention combined with surrender, of emptiness and, in an organizational setting, the skills of community.
But community does require this skill of non-management, of voluntarily giving up some control within certain parameters. You cannot bring God onto your management team if you want to order everything yourself without asking any direction from him. Build community and welcome God into your organization, and you will be introducing a wild card. A good wild card. A creative wild card. The game will still look the same on the outside. But on the inside there will be that much more spice and excitement along with more 'valuable and agreeable things not sought for.'
When we began FCE, we assumed that the church would be a natural market for its services. Christians generally knew that the early church seemed to have had an extraordinary amount of community and that the notion of 'Christian community, although largely lost, remained an ideal. Many clergy and laypeople bemoaned the lack of community within their churches. As an individual, Jesus had clearly transcended local culture, and the first major decision of his church was to peacefully go international. In recent years, the church in the United States has increasingly become involved in the peace movement. And what organization could possibly be more interested in welcoming the presence of God into its midst?
Conversely, we assumed that, with its competitive secular orientation and hierarchical structure, business would be the last place we would ever penetrate with our intimacy demanding culture.
What has emerged over the past six years, however, has been an astonishing relative lack of interest on the part of the church in our community building services and an equally astonishing and burgeoning interest on the part of business.
The resistance on the part of the church has been so dramatic that a large and active volunteer 'FCE Task Force on Community and the Christian Church' sprang up to analyze the reasons for that resistance and, it is hoped, to develop effective strategies for overcoming it.The outcome is still unknown, but as I have thought about it, the emerging trend actually makes a lot of sense. Community requires a good deal of time and work. The workplace is the center of most people's lives. Next comes the family. Church, if it comes in at all, is usually a poor third or fourth. Most churchgoers simply do not have the time to 'do' community at church. Nor do they want to do the often painful work of emotionally stretching at church that community requires. They want the worship service to be pleasantly uplifting, and if they do not like the pretentiousness of the social hour, they are at least willing to put up with it in order to keep everything nice. Most want church to be pseudocommunity, and despite any protestations to the contrary, they have no real desire to see the boat, and their lives, rocked in the least. The minority who do invest their volunteer time more extensively in the church often do so out of their own leadership needs-that is, they use the church as a sphere of influence in which they can, at times, play very personal power games. The few who make attempts to actualize the church as a place of the Kingdom of God on earth may find themselves silenced by the congregation with an enormously powerful, subtle effectiveness.
Business is another matter. It is no one- or two-hour-a week affair. Church is not where people's lives are on the line, but their workplace is. Here is where a single decision may cost them their employment, their livelihood. Here is where millions of dollars may be in play every day-sums of money a thousand times greater than their entire annual church budget. These decisions count. Here, therefore, of necessity, people may be willing to spend the time and effort to ensure that their decisions are the right ones. It is in business that they may be willing to pay the price of community.
I must emphasize this is a relative phenomenon. Here and there a most unusual church does work seriously toward community. Interest is not totally absent. FCE is doing some workshops with parts of congregations as well as for entire monastic groups. Its task force has found reason to believe that ten percent of the members of many congregations may be willing to meet community's high requirements of time, energy, and vulnerability. This 'tithe of persons' might well prove sufficient to achieve extraordinary results in God's service on behalf of the church as a whole.
At first, the dramatic, relative lack of interest on the part of the church and relative interest on the part of business distressed me. I had hoped the church would serve as a place where the Kingdom could be practiced and people would learn the skills of forging a planetary culture of civility. But then, as it occurred to me that God had possibly largely left the church and gone into business, I was struck by its appropriateness. What better place for God to do her work than in the workplace!
So I have a prophecy to make. If Utopia is to emerge, it will do so primarily from the world of business. This only makes sense. When defined as a condition of society as a whole, of an entire culture, Utopia cannot be instituted by an individual or small deviant group; it can only be instituted through our largest, best-organized, everyday institutions. Only such large organizations have the structure, the wherewithal, and the motive to provide and demand of their employees the continuing on-the-job training required.
But how is this to come about? Granted that community is the way to a planetary culture of civility, how will community be introduced into businesses? And why? Since community requires such a significant amount of time and often painful emotional work, what will motivate business to adopt it? The remainder of this chapter and book will be devoted to answering this question in detail. But there is one overarching answer. It is why business is already evidencing so much more interest in community than the church. The bottom line in business is not saving souls. If healthy, it is not even immediate as opposed to long-term profitability. It is cost-effectiveness. Business will adopt community as a standard mode of operation for the sole reason that community is cost-effective.
How does one convince a business that an entirely different, emotionally challenging and time-consuming way of doing things is cost-effective? Usually even more than a truly visionary executive is required. Timing is crucial. A new and difficult way is not likely to be tried until it is clear that the old way is not working. The easiest point at which to introduce community into a business is a time of failure, a time of crisis.
So it was that the VDC sought community building services at a time of crisis. It had lost over twenty-five percent of its physicians in the preceding year. There was clearly a failure of retention. In the year following its instituting of community, its number of physicians increased more than forty percent. It had clearly done something that was highly cost-effective.
It is not accidental either, then, that the very first workshop FCE ever did in May 1985 was for a group of civic leaders of Peoria, Illinois, a 'one-company town' that was suffering from a twenty-two percent unemployment rate at the time because of the near failure of the Caterpillar Tractor Company under the stress of Japanese competition. We were very anxious. About the only thing we knew about the city was the cliche, 'If it will play in Peoria, it will play anywhere.' At the conclusion of the workshop, the leaders were presented with a drawing of a tractor overlaid in large letters with the words, 'Yes, it did play in Peoria.' FCE has since conducted workshops for groups of civic leaders of towns in Texas, Louisiana, and Montana also afflicted by poverty.
The 'opportunity of failure' may not be overtly financial. Bob Roberts was able to introduce community into the Louisiana prison system of the failure of its literacy training program (with the resultant high recidivism and an ultimate high cost to the state). The project demonstrated itself to be dramatically effective in enhancing literacy training, although its cost-effectiveness has not yet been calculated in terms of dollars and cents. FCE's services have been requested by a number of organizations because of a failure of morale. And as mentioned, we have done workshops for several groups of public agency managers who were suffering from a failure of interagency cooperation. All such failures have their economic as well as social consequences.
A related window of opportunity arises when a business is not actually experiencing a failure but is anticipating one. It is unlikely that top executive would have directed the labor-management team to go through community building if he had anticipated that the negotiations would be successful. One such instance does not a science make, and it is impossible to state with certainty that the negotiations would have failed without the community building work that was done. FCE's fees for those two workshops totaled $18,000. Had the negotiations failed, it is likely the failure would have cost the company and its employees between $18 million and $180 million. That's cost-effectiveness. It was an example of preventive medicine at its most dramatic.
There is one critical time in business life when the preventive medicine of community building is obviously needed and would be extraordinarily cost-effective, but where it has not yet been employed. It is a time when failure can definitely be anticipated, a disaster waiting to happen. I am referring to corporate mergers. Mergers are relatively easy to accomplish on paper. The lawyers and accountants may charge huge fees, but when they are done the product looks letter-perfect. Yet from a functional point of view, most mergers are notoriously ineffective or inefficient. The problem is inherent in the very word, because it implies a squashing together of two different corporate cultures. Different cultures do not merge very well. As a rule, the result is both great turmoil and the destruction of the virtuous aspects of one or both cultures.
The key to solving the problem the moment the lawyers and accountants are finished is to begin to create a new culture at the very top: a 'supraculture' that, for the moment, leaves the two existing cultures (now 'subcultures') perfectly intact. The process of community building is the vehicle, par excellence, for the creation of a new culture. Moreover, such a top-management team operating in community would be the ideal body to make the wisest possible consensual decisions required to develop the complex plan necessary to deal coherently with a host of questions. Which aspects of the subcultures are assets and which are liabilities? To what extent can these assets be preserved while discarding the liabilities? What actions need to be taken to facilitate the transmission of cultural values from the top down or between the subcultures? What actions need to be taken to either integrate the subcultures or keep them separate? Should any new structures be developed? Should any old ones be abolished? Positions? Titles? Layoffs? Humane cost savings? What should be the timing and sequence of these actions? What are the possible measurements of their effectiveness, and what feedback loops can be established to allow, when appropriate, rapid strategic revisions?
When-and only when-there is such a carefully thought-out strategic plan can the merger actually be accomplished in a civil manner, as opposed to a mindless crushing together of two companies with uncivil and expensive results.
Related to mergers are acquisitions. It is a time of new beginning, a crisis not of failure or even anticipated failure but an opportunity for improvement. FCE has not yet been able to work on such a new beginning in the private sector. It has, however, successfully assisted in the initiation of several public sector programs-a somewhat analogous situation.
I have mentioned such opportunities as if they were somehow more important than individual leadership. To the contrary, the technology of community building and maintenance is currently so new there must be a visionary executive around to take advantage of them in this way. Our public sector work has invariably been made possible by unusually innovative, 'global' thinkers in government. There was a single physician at the Valley Diagnostic and Surgical Clinic who had the vision to lead his fellow physicians to grudgingly set aside three days for their first experience of community building. The top executive who attended the public workshop young Frank organized was clearly visionary. No sooner did he experience his first public workshop than Bob Roberts was already inquiring, `Do you think community building could work in prisons?'
Professor Michael Ray, an expert on 'the new paradigm in business,' contracted with FCE to do a Community Building Workshop in 1990 for a visionary class he was teaching at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. In this course his students are required to form into relatively large work groups to develop innovative strategies and programs for real companies asking for this input. In the past he found that the groups did not work very well together and that strong disruptive conflicts developed. The class participating in the workshop-while diverse in terms of experience, skills, racial and ethnic background, and geographical origin (five continents and over twenty states were represented)-was able to work harmoniously over an extended period of time. The students utilized the diversity within each work group by honoring each individual in the context of group goals. Both morale and learning improved. The company sponsors were extremely pleased with the results. It would seem that not only the disadvantaged in a Louisiana prison can learn better when they are in community but also the relatively advantaged in a Californian graduate school. Indeed, one of the concepts of the new paradigm in business is that the workplace can be-and should be-a learning environment as well as a cost-effective, profit-making enterprise.
Several managers, familiar with FCE's work, have introduced community into their departments not because there was a failure or crisis or particular window of opportunity, but simply because they wanted to manage in the best way possible. A visionary leader can introduce community into her business at any time, given the right sort of political climate. Still, there is often nothing like a crisis to create the right sort of climate.
In our pain-avoiding culture, most people think that the mentally healthy life is one characterized by an absence of crises. Nothing could be further from the truth. What characterizes mental health is how early we meet our crises.
The word crisis has become fashionable these days in terms of 'mid-life crisis.' It is a very real phenomenon. A huge variety of critical issues may be involved, but one way or another most of them relate to the issue of aging. I have yet to meet a man or woman who has entered old age without being afflicted by a mid-life crisis. What differs is timing.
The later in his life the mid-life crisis occurs, the less likely it is that one will be able to resolve it successfully. A man who is particularly fearful of the issues of aging will try to ignore them for as long as possible. I have known people who have avoided facing them not only during their thirties and forties but through their fifties as well. Ultimately, however, aging cannot be ignored, and it is not difficult to realize that the longer a man puts off facing the issues, the more they will then hit him like a ton of bricks. The blow may be permanently incapacitating. So, fearful of the issues to begin with, such people may never be able to resolve them. There are unfortunate millions who defer their midlife crises to age sixty or more and then spend the remaining twenty years of their lives in chronic depression, even despair.
Conversely, the less fearful a person is of such issues, the earlier she will be able to meet them-even anticipate them-and the more easily she will be able to do the psychospiritual work necessary to resolve them. The healthiest people I know invariably begin this work in their forties-sometimes even late thirties-and have completed it by the end of their fifties. They have already finished what the unhealthy have not yet started.
Actually, it is possible for healthy people to have several mid-life crises of different flavors. The point is that what characterizes mental health is not an absence of crises in our lives but how quickly we can deal with each crisis so as to get on the next one. Indeed, the goal may be to see how many crises we can cram into a lifetime. There is a devastating psychological disorder that afflicts perhaps one or two percent of the population that compels them to lead lives of compulsive histrionics. They can't function unless there is a crisis. But the far more devastating form of psychological disorder-which afflicts approximately ninety-five percent of individuals-is that they fail to live their lives with a sufficient sense of drama. They do not wake up and realize the critical nature of their lives until it is often too late.
As it is with individuals, so it is with organizations. A few managers love to operate in a mode of continual crisis, but it is a destructive style of management. Far more commonly, however, an organization will spend an enormous amount of effort trying to deny-ignore-the fact that it is in crisis. When it finally does wake up to the fact, it may be too late.
One way of looking at community building is to see it as a crisis-precipitating process. As we have seen, a group usually begins in pseudocommunity, pretending that everyone likes one another (even though they usually don't really know one another) and there is no problem. When this pretense no longer works, the group 'degenerates' into chaos. I put the word degenerates in quotes because while this feels like a deterioration, chaos is actually a step forward in the direction of reality and genuine civility. Consequently, it is the leaders' task early in the community building process to actually encourage chaos. The chaos then becomes a crisis that the group needs to work itself out of. The beginning of this work is the beginning of that stage we have called emptiness, where the members empty themselves of their old ways of relating and start experimenting with new and better ways. Change and growth have been precipitated.
I suspect another source of the resistance on the part of the church to community building is that congregations do not want to go through the pain of chaos. It may not be so much that they desire to be pseudo-communities as that they are instinctively terrified of disintegration, and lack the motivation to hang in together through a period of chaos where everything seems to be falling apart. While churches may get by on chronic pseudocommunity, however, business cannot. Changing external conditions in the marketplace or internal conditions in the workforce routinely force businesses into crisis, but they do not then look forward to the next crisis, and they tend then to forget about maintaining themselves in community.
One of the things we need to do as we push toward Utopia is to dignify organizational chaos. I do not mean structural chaos. I mean the psychospiritual chaos that erupts in an organization when there is sufficient confusion over its vision, mission, myths, norms, and patterns of communication as to produce overt conflict among its members.
The work to dignify chaos has already begun. At the level of organization of subatomic particles, Ilya Prigogine has won a Nobel prize for his study of 'dissipative structures,' his term for a period of organizational breakdown through which such particles pass as they move to a higher energy state. And going up the system scale to our primary focus, there is Tom Peters's recent best-selling book about health and growth in business organizations, Thriving on Chaos.Chaos may not be an ideal state, but as has been noted, it is one step ahead of pseudocommunity, and a group cannot mature from pseudocommunity into a genuine community without going through it. I believe the managers of the future will actually learn and deliberately employ techniques to precipitate certain amounts of chaos or crisis when they sense their organizations need revitalization.
As businesses consider paying the price of community maintenance-the price of organizational health, preventive medicine, or ongoing civility-it may help them to refer back to theology and the nature of God. An individual who has developed a conscious relationship with God will probably be engaged in developing that relationship-often with anguish and struggle-for the rest of his or her everchanging life. Is it remarkable, then, that an organization that allows God into its midst will also need to continue to 'wrestle with the angel'?
The cutting edge in theology these days is called 'process theology.' Academicians tend to date the onset of this movement to the work of Alfred North Whitehead in the 1940's, although I suspect it goes way back before that. However, I began my journey into the process theology not by reading Whitehead or learning about it from any other kind of book, but through a combination of experience, intuition, and perhaps even revelation.
The moment was fifteen years ago, as I was sitting in my office with a thirty-five-year-old patient. She was a very attractive person, perhaps as much as eight pounds over the standard weight for women of her age and height. The preceding evening at a joyful restaurant party, she was so relaxed she had ordered and eaten an ice cream sundae for dessert. Now she was lamenting, 'How could I have been so stupid? After only six days I broke my diet! Now I have to start all over again. I hate myself for being so undisciplined. An ice cream sundae, for Christ's sake! Butterscotch sauce. Thick, gooey. I mean, I couldn't have chosen anything that had more calories. One of these days I'll.. .'
As she went on and on in this vein I found myself drifting off slightly, thinking how utterly typical she was of a large category of women whom I found sexually appealing, yet who spent endless ergs of energy obsessing about their weight, even about the most minor deviations in it. What was going on with them? In the midst of this wondering, I suddenly interrupted her, blurting out, 'What makes you think that God doesn't have to diet?'
She looked at me as if I'd gone crazy: 'Why'd you say that?' she asked.
I scratched my head, replying, 'I don't know.' But I had to think about why I'd said it, and as I did, I realized that I was onto something. I realized that my patient was laboring under a fantasy that if she read enough diet books or discovered just the right diet or received enough psychotherapy, then she would achieve a state where she could either eat all she wanted without gaining an ounce or else whenever she did gain that ounce, be able instantly and effortlessly to lose it. A strange fantasy, come to think of it. 'Maybe God puts on five pounds,' I explained to her, 'and then has to take them off. Only he doesn't make a big deal out of it, which is perhaps why he's God.'
That's how I stumbled onto process theology.
The illusion my patient labored under was a static notion of perfection. It is a very common but very destructive notion that perfection is an unchanging state. It is so common because it is so purely logical. If something is perfect and it changes, it can only become imperfect. But if something is truly perfect, it cannot, by definition, become imperfect. Hence perfection must be unchanging. And so we think, 'God is as God was and always will be.'
But it's not the way I think anymore. It's also hardly what the Bible suggests. And increasingly it's not what theologians are beginning to think. Thank God! If there is anything that characterizes life, it is change. As already mentioned, what most distinguishes the animate moves when you poke at it. It doesn't just sit there. It's alive. It goes this way and that way. It grows, it decays, it gets reborn. It changes. All life is in process. And since I choose to have a living God, I believe that my God is also in process, learning and growing and perhaps even laughing and dancing.
Why is this new concept of process theology so critically important? Because it means that it is good for organizations, like people, to be in a state of change. All organizations are in process, but the healthier they are, the more they will be in process. The more vibrant, the more lively they are, the more they will be changing. And the closer to perfection they are, the more rapidly they will be changing.
So, as we change our theology, we will come to expect our organizations to be in flux and in turmoil. We will know, not only in our heads but in our hearts, that if an organization lets God into itself, it will be welcoming even more flux and turmoil. We will know when we see a comfortable, complacent, particularly stable organization that it is undoubtedly in a state-or at least a phase-of decay. And if we see an organization that is suffering, struggling, searching this way and that for new solutions, one that is constantly revising and reviving itself, our tendency will not only be to give it the benefit of the doubt but to suspect that we may have stumbled upon a particularly godly institution.
For these same reasons, Utopia will not be stable or static. It will be evolving. It should not be thought of as a condition that we reach, because no sooner will we reach it than it will move on. It will not be a condition without suffering, without the stress and strain that inherently accompany change or development. Rather it will be a society moving with maximal vitality toward maximal vitality.
In summary, Utopia may not be impossible to achieve after all.
It will be impossible if we hold on to our traditional vision of perfection. In accord with this antiquated vision, Utopia in the past has generally been conceived as an isolated commune carved out within an otherwise imperfect world. Assets are held communally so that members are all economically equal. While the members work, the communal culture is antibusiness. There is no hierarchy, and consequently, no one is ever fired or 'excommunicated.'
The rules are so effective that the society is not only stable but unchanging. Although these rules may be considered to be divinely inspired, once in place there is no longer any role for God to play, any need for further divine intervention. There are no surprises and people need not struggle with each other toward a better future. In fact, there is no progress-since perfection. has already been reached. Civility has been legislated; hence, it is not an ongoing process but an effortless, painless static state.
No wonder such utopian ventures have always failed. They were based on false, unrealistic assumptions. They were antithetical to everything we know about real civility and real community. Maybe they also failed because they were insufferably dull.
Based on what we know about civility and have learned thus far about community, let me consolidate what has been said by offering a radically different utopian vision.
My Utopia of the future will always be in the future. This is because Utopia is not a state arrived at but a state of becoming. Indeed, we might think of Utopia as having already started. Barely.
The distinguishing feature of the citizens of Utopia is not their location, nationality, religion, or occupation but their commitment to becoming ever more civil individuals and their membership in a planetary culture of civility. By virtue of this commitment and membership, regardless of their theology, they welcome the active presence of God into both their individual and their collective lives. They believe in progress. They see themselves as growing psychospiritually. They are willing to accept the pain of growth and are eager for any surprising assistance they can receive from a Higher Power. They know they cannot go it alone without God or their fellow humans. Although their primary allegiance is to the development of their own souls, they are all involved in teaching as well as learning civility and dedicated to inviting others into their planetary culture.
They will teach civility wherever they can, as parents in families or educators in classrooms or parishioners in church. But as we move over toward Utopia, the primary role of teaching civility will be assumed by business. Business will assume this role out of self-interest as it learns the technology of community building and maintenance and just how cost-effective genuine civility is. Among their other missions, businesses will increasingly think of themselves as teaching and learning organizations. Eventually, the teaching of civility will become systematic-an integral part of the whole system of society-as the practice of community becomes endemic in business and the workplace. Every employee of any sizable business will automatically receive ongoing, on-the-job training in community as businesses increasingly operate in a community mode.
This does not mean that all will then be sweetness and light. People will continue to differ in their levels of competence. There will continue to be economic cycles and the necessity of layoffs. There will still be mental illnesses and the occasional devious individual who must be fired. What it does mean, however, is that gradually real civility both in and outside the workplace will become ever more common and incivility ever less normative. The kinds of advertisements cited early in the book, appealing to our baser natures, will cease to sell.
But one last stumbling block needs consideration as business organizations begin to lead the way in forging a planetary culture of civility.
When the two labor-management teams, after building community, independently decided that instead of coming to the table they would get rid of the table, they were doing something not only revolutionary but utopian. They also independently requested FCE to keep it secret. Correctly, I believe, they surmised that their work in community would not be trusted by their constituencies, the labor union and management as a whole, who were accustomed to traditional adversarialism and utterly unfamiliar with community. But this raises a question. How does a utopian organization honestly introduce itself to the larger society? The answer is, 'carefully.'
I think this political problem of organizational civility can best be analyzed in relation to the essentially uncivil but prevailing ethic of rugged individualism. Just as this fallacious 'ethic' (so antithetical to the principles of community) governs the behavior of most individual human beings, even more does it currently govern the behavior of organizations. They must pretend that they have it all together, that they are utterly in control of the situation, that they are totally competent. General Electric does not announce its internal problems. The United States doesn't admit that it has been wrong.
In the course of the community building this ethic is shattered. Men and women drop their masks of composure. They confess their problems. They become, with great relief, publicly comfortable with themselves as imperfect, burdened, struggling people. In doing this they also reveal to themselves and to each other what I have come to call 'the routine heroism of human beings.' In the same way, organizations that build themselves into communities come to see themselves as imperfect, wounded, and struggling agencies, companies, or corporations. The problem is that they then become increasingly uncomfortable presenting to the world a facade of constant composure and ostensible perfection. They know it is a front, a lie. How long do they maintain the pretense? And what should their political strategy be in giving it up?
The difficulty is not internal. Individuals building themselves into a community have considerable assurance of confidentiality: the knowledge of their 'sins' will be maintained internally, will be kept within the group. Part of the problem of `'re-entry,' however, is the issue of how they are going to behave when the workshop is over, when they leave it and reenter everyday society governed by the rules of rugged individualism. How do they now relate with the external world? They are usually a little more free, a little more honest, with a few selected people, but generally they put their masks back on, albeit somewhat less rigidly.
The problem for organizations is of similar kind but far greater magnitude. It is not that difficult for an organization to build itself into a community-even at all levels-so that every employee knows the company is in some way fragile, some ways wounded and hurting, and very much struggling, and feels proud to belong to such a company. But how should such a human and humane business relate with the external world and present itself to a public that expects high-gloss images of smoothness and perfection?
It is an intensely real problem. Even FCE, a nonprofit organization whose very purpose is community, must wrestle with it. We know ourselves to be a wounded organization.Yet our publications do not always reflect this reality. To what extent should our newsletter contain notes about how FCE's most recent Leaders' Roundtable was a meeting of unrelieved chaos? Or that the board member who recently resigned did so in anger? Or that the board and staff are in conflict? Or that we ended last year considerably in the red because ofan absurdly optimistic misjudgment of how many new large donors we would attract? Do we tell potential major donors that we desperately need their help because our financial situation is so shaky? Yes, some might want to help out. But many more would surely think, `I certainly wouldn't want to throw good money after bad, put it into a potentially sinking ship, or invest in an organization that doesn't have its act together!'
If FCE has this problem, think what it is like for a corporation whose shares sell on the New York Stock Exchange! How high-gloss do its publications need to be? How much attention must it pay to its image? (And how much of its profits must it divert from stockholders to maintain its image to these same stockholders?) How are we, as a society, going to solve this problem of corporate images and organizational hype?
How do we get to a world in which General Electric or General Motors or the U.S. government can acknowledge internal problems without being under the gun from investigatory reporters? When the nations of the world can learn to apologize to one another? If we are going to make any progress toward Utopia, it is a problem that must be solved. For the present, we are caught in a vicious cycle. In attempting to present false fronts of perfection, organizations teach the public to have unrealistic expectations of perfection, which further compel the organizations to create even glossier images to feed those expectations. And so it goes, round and round.
The way the problem is going to be solved is by organizational courage. The giant steps forward in the community building process are taken by those individuals of such courage that they are able to risk speaking at a level of vulnerability and authenticity at which no one in the group has spoken before. It only takes one individual at a time. As soon as she speaks at that level, then others in the group will follow, and shortly everyone will be talking that way. Then after a while, another individual will start speaking at a still deeper level of vulnerability and authenticity. Shortly he will be followed and everyone will be talking at that level also. And so the process will go for organizations. Someday an organization will be secure enough in itself to have the courage to dramatically cast away one of its images of invulnerability. As soon as other businesses see how it has gotten away with it, they will start to do likewise. And the whole culture will have begun to shift.
Primarily the shift will occur not merely because the world has seen that the vulnerable (internally as well as externally) business has gotten away with it, but because it has become extraordinarily successful in the process of doing so. We return to the concept that community in the workplace and organizational civility will succeed because it is cost-effective. In his work on servant leadership, Greenleaf posited that the world will be saved if it can develop just three truly well-managed, large institutions-one in the private sector, one in the public sector, and one in the nonprofit sector. Just one major profit-making corporation, one major government agency, and one charitable organization! He believed-and I know-that such excellence in management will be achieved through an organizational culture of civility routinely utilizing the mode of community. Such organizations will be so dramatically successful, that is, cost-effective, that their sister institutions-no matter how initially threatened-will flock to discover their secret and imitate them.
But we're far from there now. It's going to take us a long time before we can become such a civil society, before organizations as well as individuals are maximally vulnerable. Until then those organizations practicing community are going to have to wrestle continually with the political problem of how to function in a culture that is not yet comfortable with community or real civility. Until that time-and beyond that time-they will continue to need to struggle to figure out how to be, from moment to moment, organizations that are in the world but not of the world.
Extracted from M Scott Peck's A World Waiting to be Born
Lily and I pulled into town late Thursday night. The conference was to begin on Friday evening. Friday afternoon I took a nap from which I awoke with one of those rare, revelatory dreams that occasionally slaps me awake-that Carl Jung used to refer to as a 'big dream.' It was my first and only Star Trek dream.
In it, I was a cultural anthropologist who had been hopping around the galaxy examining a number of different planetary societies. With considerable forethought I had saved the best for last: a distant society that, from my home planet and scholarly position, had seemed on paper to be ideally designed, a very probable Utopia. When I finally got there, however, I discovered that this society was no better or no worse than that of any of the other clearly inadequate and defective cultures I had visited. My disappointment was intense. I awoke from this dream screaming at my local guide in frustration, 'But I had assumed that on this planet the Laws of Serendipity would hold true as they do everywhere else.'
The dream-this gift-focused with exquisite clarity upon an issue that desperately needed to be addressed. The topic of `social engineering' had already been touched upon twice in the conference before I spoke. I began my speech by recounting the dream. The moral of it, I explained, is that 'There is no question in my mind that we are called to build Utopia, but if we think we can do it solely by our design, we are sadly mistaken. We can do it only in cooperation with the grace of God. Any attempt at radical "social engineering" that does not incorporate God, that does not welcome grace and leave vast room for divine intervention, will utterly fail.' I was then able to go on to specify how the `technology' of community building succeeds, in part, precisely because it takes God into mind, depends upon her, and deliberately produces space for the Holy Spirit to do her thing.
I am profoundly aware of how strange these words must sound to most executives. Even those who are deeply and personally religious, who have had considerable experience with letting God into their own individual lives, have in all probability never even thought of what it would be like to let God into their organizations. But there is no other way for me to talk about it. Uneasy over how to communicate with the hardheaded, intensely practical business world, FCE (the Foundation for Community Encouragement) for several years struggled to develop some sort of marketing language that would not have to use such words as 'God' or 'love.' Eventually we gave up. We have to call a spade a spade.
And then we grow almost incoherent when asked, 'Well, what does it look like when God comes into an organization?' The answer is that nothing changes and everything changes. It is the sort of mystical response of Zen Buddhist language. 'Before I was enlightened,' one Zen master explained, `the mountains looked like mountains and the rivers like rivers. At the moment of enlightenment I saw it all differently. And now that I am enlightened, the mountains look like mountains again and the rivers like rivers.' Or, when asked what it was like to be enlightened, another Zen master answered, 'I chop wood and carry water.'
If you build community and let God into your organization, on the outside it will look pretty much the same. You will probably continue to have exactly the same organizational structure. You will continue to chop wood and carry water. There will be the same sorts of budgets and inventories and action plans and deadlines. But on the inside it will all be different. There will be a different spirit. There will be more spirit. It will be more alive.
So you need not be the least bit threatened by any radical change in titles, positions, lines of authority, or other structure for reasons that have already been elaborated. There is only one thing threatening about introducing community into your organization: a loss of control of certain outcomes. You won't lose control of 'bottom line' outcomes, such as profitability or fiscal accountability. Community is utterly realistic and would never lose sight of such things. But other 'things' will no longer be so predictable.
There is a common, perfectly human and understandable 'business mentality' that immediately focuses on outcomes. Natural though it may be, it causes considerable grief to FCE as it attempts to market its services to organizations. 'If I and my top management team do one of your community building workshops,' executives ask, 'what will be the outcomes?'
'We don't know,' FCE must reply.
'You don't know?' The questioner is aghast.
'No. Community is an adventure. We never can predict what will happen when a group becomes authentic and open to the Spirit. It's full of surprises. Thank God, because while the outcomes are usually quite different from what we imagined, they are often far better than we could have dreamed.'
By way of illustration, recall two examples from the preceding chapters. The labor-management team wanted some assurance they wouldn't cry or talk about God. FCE wouldn't give them that assurance, but they were satisfied on learning such behavior wasn't mandatory. Then shortly after the workshop began they were crying and speaking of God-the two outcomes they wanted to avoid. Neither they nor FCE could have predicted the ultimate outcome that Epiphany they would so boldly and thoroughly revolutionize their way of working together. But what a salutary outcome it was!
The other was the example of failure. That workshop failed because the vice-president for marketing was so unwilling to be open to unpredictable outcomes. He was terrified of what might happen were the group to open talk about their corporate culture. Had he allowed it, I suspect the outcome would have been as salutary as it was for the labor-management teams. But he couldn't allow it He couldn't give up that much control.
Community, within certain parameters, 'lets it happen.' This voluntary loss of control (or emptiness) feels scary at first, but the outcome is freedom and creativity. And God. Unexpected creativity. Unforeseen genius.
Remember the definition of serendipity as 'the gift of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.' It is, by definition, an unanticipated outcome. Recently a woman who had just undergone a religious conversion wrote to me saying that she wanted to 'learn grace-management skills.' I. had to laugh, since on one level the basic grace-management skill is the skill of non-management. You do not manage grace; you let it manage you. Actually, however, she was not entirely off base. There are grace-management skills. They are the skills of attention combined with surrender, of emptiness and, in an organizational setting, the skills of community.
But community does require this skill of non-management, of voluntarily giving up some control within certain parameters. You cannot bring God onto your management team if you want to order everything yourself without asking any direction from him. Build community and welcome God into your organization, and you will be introducing a wild card. A good wild card. A creative wild card. The game will still look the same on the outside. But on the inside there will be that much more spice and excitement along with more 'valuable and agreeable things not sought for.'
When we began FCE, we assumed that the church would be a natural market for its services. Christians generally knew that the early church seemed to have had an extraordinary amount of community and that the notion of 'Christian community, although largely lost, remained an ideal. Many clergy and laypeople bemoaned the lack of community within their churches. As an individual, Jesus had clearly transcended local culture, and the first major decision of his church was to peacefully go international. In recent years, the church in the United States has increasingly become involved in the peace movement. And what organization could possibly be more interested in welcoming the presence of God into its midst?
Conversely, we assumed that, with its competitive secular orientation and hierarchical structure, business would be the last place we would ever penetrate with our intimacy demanding culture.
What has emerged over the past six years, however, has been an astonishing relative lack of interest on the part of the church in our community building services and an equally astonishing and burgeoning interest on the part of business.
The resistance on the part of the church has been so dramatic that a large and active volunteer 'FCE Task Force on Community and the Christian Church' sprang up to analyze the reasons for that resistance and, it is hoped, to develop effective strategies for overcoming it.The outcome is still unknown, but as I have thought about it, the emerging trend actually makes a lot of sense. Community requires a good deal of time and work. The workplace is the center of most people's lives. Next comes the family. Church, if it comes in at all, is usually a poor third or fourth. Most churchgoers simply do not have the time to 'do' community at church. Nor do they want to do the often painful work of emotionally stretching at church that community requires. They want the worship service to be pleasantly uplifting, and if they do not like the pretentiousness of the social hour, they are at least willing to put up with it in order to keep everything nice. Most want church to be pseudocommunity, and despite any protestations to the contrary, they have no real desire to see the boat, and their lives, rocked in the least. The minority who do invest their volunteer time more extensively in the church often do so out of their own leadership needs-that is, they use the church as a sphere of influence in which they can, at times, play very personal power games. The few who make attempts to actualize the church as a place of the Kingdom of God on earth may find themselves silenced by the congregation with an enormously powerful, subtle effectiveness.
Business is another matter. It is no one- or two-hour-a week affair. Church is not where people's lives are on the line, but their workplace is. Here is where a single decision may cost them their employment, their livelihood. Here is where millions of dollars may be in play every day-sums of money a thousand times greater than their entire annual church budget. These decisions count. Here, therefore, of necessity, people may be willing to spend the time and effort to ensure that their decisions are the right ones. It is in business that they may be willing to pay the price of community.
I must emphasize this is a relative phenomenon. Here and there a most unusual church does work seriously toward community. Interest is not totally absent. FCE is doing some workshops with parts of congregations as well as for entire monastic groups. Its task force has found reason to believe that ten percent of the members of many congregations may be willing to meet community's high requirements of time, energy, and vulnerability. This 'tithe of persons' might well prove sufficient to achieve extraordinary results in God's service on behalf of the church as a whole.
At first, the dramatic, relative lack of interest on the part of the church and relative interest on the part of business distressed me. I had hoped the church would serve as a place where the Kingdom could be practiced and people would learn the skills of forging a planetary culture of civility. But then, as it occurred to me that God had possibly largely left the church and gone into business, I was struck by its appropriateness. What better place for God to do her work than in the workplace!
So I have a prophecy to make. If Utopia is to emerge, it will do so primarily from the world of business. This only makes sense. When defined as a condition of society as a whole, of an entire culture, Utopia cannot be instituted by an individual or small deviant group; it can only be instituted through our largest, best-organized, everyday institutions. Only such large organizations have the structure, the wherewithal, and the motive to provide and demand of their employees the continuing on-the-job training required.
But how is this to come about? Granted that community is the way to a planetary culture of civility, how will community be introduced into businesses? And why? Since community requires such a significant amount of time and often painful emotional work, what will motivate business to adopt it? The remainder of this chapter and book will be devoted to answering this question in detail. But there is one overarching answer. It is why business is already evidencing so much more interest in community than the church. The bottom line in business is not saving souls. If healthy, it is not even immediate as opposed to long-term profitability. It is cost-effectiveness. Business will adopt community as a standard mode of operation for the sole reason that community is cost-effective.
How does one convince a business that an entirely different, emotionally challenging and time-consuming way of doing things is cost-effective? Usually even more than a truly visionary executive is required. Timing is crucial. A new and difficult way is not likely to be tried until it is clear that the old way is not working. The easiest point at which to introduce community into a business is a time of failure, a time of crisis.
So it was that the VDC sought community building services at a time of crisis. It had lost over twenty-five percent of its physicians in the preceding year. There was clearly a failure of retention. In the year following its instituting of community, its number of physicians increased more than forty percent. It had clearly done something that was highly cost-effective.
It is not accidental either, then, that the very first workshop FCE ever did in May 1985 was for a group of civic leaders of Peoria, Illinois, a 'one-company town' that was suffering from a twenty-two percent unemployment rate at the time because of the near failure of the Caterpillar Tractor Company under the stress of Japanese competition. We were very anxious. About the only thing we knew about the city was the cliche, 'If it will play in Peoria, it will play anywhere.' At the conclusion of the workshop, the leaders were presented with a drawing of a tractor overlaid in large letters with the words, 'Yes, it did play in Peoria.' FCE has since conducted workshops for groups of civic leaders of towns in Texas, Louisiana, and Montana also afflicted by poverty.
The 'opportunity of failure' may not be overtly financial. Bob Roberts was able to introduce community into the Louisiana prison system of the failure of its literacy training program (with the resultant high recidivism and an ultimate high cost to the state). The project demonstrated itself to be dramatically effective in enhancing literacy training, although its cost-effectiveness has not yet been calculated in terms of dollars and cents. FCE's services have been requested by a number of organizations because of a failure of morale. And as mentioned, we have done workshops for several groups of public agency managers who were suffering from a failure of interagency cooperation. All such failures have their economic as well as social consequences.
A related window of opportunity arises when a business is not actually experiencing a failure but is anticipating one. It is unlikely that top executive would have directed the labor-management team to go through community building if he had anticipated that the negotiations would be successful. One such instance does not a science make, and it is impossible to state with certainty that the negotiations would have failed without the community building work that was done. FCE's fees for those two workshops totaled $18,000. Had the negotiations failed, it is likely the failure would have cost the company and its employees between $18 million and $180 million. That's cost-effectiveness. It was an example of preventive medicine at its most dramatic.
There is one critical time in business life when the preventive medicine of community building is obviously needed and would be extraordinarily cost-effective, but where it has not yet been employed. It is a time when failure can definitely be anticipated, a disaster waiting to happen. I am referring to corporate mergers. Mergers are relatively easy to accomplish on paper. The lawyers and accountants may charge huge fees, but when they are done the product looks letter-perfect. Yet from a functional point of view, most mergers are notoriously ineffective or inefficient. The problem is inherent in the very word, because it implies a squashing together of two different corporate cultures. Different cultures do not merge very well. As a rule, the result is both great turmoil and the destruction of the virtuous aspects of one or both cultures.
The key to solving the problem the moment the lawyers and accountants are finished is to begin to create a new culture at the very top: a 'supraculture' that, for the moment, leaves the two existing cultures (now 'subcultures') perfectly intact. The process of community building is the vehicle, par excellence, for the creation of a new culture. Moreover, such a top-management team operating in community would be the ideal body to make the wisest possible consensual decisions required to develop the complex plan necessary to deal coherently with a host of questions. Which aspects of the subcultures are assets and which are liabilities? To what extent can these assets be preserved while discarding the liabilities? What actions need to be taken to facilitate the transmission of cultural values from the top down or between the subcultures? What actions need to be taken to either integrate the subcultures or keep them separate? Should any new structures be developed? Should any old ones be abolished? Positions? Titles? Layoffs? Humane cost savings? What should be the timing and sequence of these actions? What are the possible measurements of their effectiveness, and what feedback loops can be established to allow, when appropriate, rapid strategic revisions?
When-and only when-there is such a carefully thought-out strategic plan can the merger actually be accomplished in a civil manner, as opposed to a mindless crushing together of two companies with uncivil and expensive results.
Related to mergers are acquisitions. It is a time of new beginning, a crisis not of failure or even anticipated failure but an opportunity for improvement. FCE has not yet been able to work on such a new beginning in the private sector. It has, however, successfully assisted in the initiation of several public sector programs-a somewhat analogous situation.
I have mentioned such opportunities as if they were somehow more important than individual leadership. To the contrary, the technology of community building and maintenance is currently so new there must be a visionary executive around to take advantage of them in this way. Our public sector work has invariably been made possible by unusually innovative, 'global' thinkers in government. There was a single physician at the Valley Diagnostic and Surgical Clinic who had the vision to lead his fellow physicians to grudgingly set aside three days for their first experience of community building. The top executive who attended the public workshop young Frank organized was clearly visionary. No sooner did he experience his first public workshop than Bob Roberts was already inquiring, `Do you think community building could work in prisons?'
Professor Michael Ray, an expert on 'the new paradigm in business,' contracted with FCE to do a Community Building Workshop in 1990 for a visionary class he was teaching at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. In this course his students are required to form into relatively large work groups to develop innovative strategies and programs for real companies asking for this input. In the past he found that the groups did not work very well together and that strong disruptive conflicts developed. The class participating in the workshop-while diverse in terms of experience, skills, racial and ethnic background, and geographical origin (five continents and over twenty states were represented)-was able to work harmoniously over an extended period of time. The students utilized the diversity within each work group by honoring each individual in the context of group goals. Both morale and learning improved. The company sponsors were extremely pleased with the results. It would seem that not only the disadvantaged in a Louisiana prison can learn better when they are in community but also the relatively advantaged in a Californian graduate school. Indeed, one of the concepts of the new paradigm in business is that the workplace can be-and should be-a learning environment as well as a cost-effective, profit-making enterprise.
Several managers, familiar with FCE's work, have introduced community into their departments not because there was a failure or crisis or particular window of opportunity, but simply because they wanted to manage in the best way possible. A visionary leader can introduce community into her business at any time, given the right sort of political climate. Still, there is often nothing like a crisis to create the right sort of climate.
In our pain-avoiding culture, most people think that the mentally healthy life is one characterized by an absence of crises. Nothing could be further from the truth. What characterizes mental health is how early we meet our crises.
The word crisis has become fashionable these days in terms of 'mid-life crisis.' It is a very real phenomenon. A huge variety of critical issues may be involved, but one way or another most of them relate to the issue of aging. I have yet to meet a man or woman who has entered old age without being afflicted by a mid-life crisis. What differs is timing.
The later in his life the mid-life crisis occurs, the less likely it is that one will be able to resolve it successfully. A man who is particularly fearful of the issues of aging will try to ignore them for as long as possible. I have known people who have avoided facing them not only during their thirties and forties but through their fifties as well. Ultimately, however, aging cannot be ignored, and it is not difficult to realize that the longer a man puts off facing the issues, the more they will then hit him like a ton of bricks. The blow may be permanently incapacitating. So, fearful of the issues to begin with, such people may never be able to resolve them. There are unfortunate millions who defer their midlife crises to age sixty or more and then spend the remaining twenty years of their lives in chronic depression, even despair.
Conversely, the less fearful a person is of such issues, the earlier she will be able to meet them-even anticipate them-and the more easily she will be able to do the psychospiritual work necessary to resolve them. The healthiest people I know invariably begin this work in their forties-sometimes even late thirties-and have completed it by the end of their fifties. They have already finished what the unhealthy have not yet started.
Actually, it is possible for healthy people to have several mid-life crises of different flavors. The point is that what characterizes mental health is not an absence of crises in our lives but how quickly we can deal with each crisis so as to get on the next one. Indeed, the goal may be to see how many crises we can cram into a lifetime. There is a devastating psychological disorder that afflicts perhaps one or two percent of the population that compels them to lead lives of compulsive histrionics. They can't function unless there is a crisis. But the far more devastating form of psychological disorder-which afflicts approximately ninety-five percent of individuals-is that they fail to live their lives with a sufficient sense of drama. They do not wake up and realize the critical nature of their lives until it is often too late.
As it is with individuals, so it is with organizations. A few managers love to operate in a mode of continual crisis, but it is a destructive style of management. Far more commonly, however, an organization will spend an enormous amount of effort trying to deny-ignore-the fact that it is in crisis. When it finally does wake up to the fact, it may be too late.
One way of looking at community building is to see it as a crisis-precipitating process. As we have seen, a group usually begins in pseudocommunity, pretending that everyone likes one another (even though they usually don't really know one another) and there is no problem. When this pretense no longer works, the group 'degenerates' into chaos. I put the word degenerates in quotes because while this feels like a deterioration, chaos is actually a step forward in the direction of reality and genuine civility. Consequently, it is the leaders' task early in the community building process to actually encourage chaos. The chaos then becomes a crisis that the group needs to work itself out of. The beginning of this work is the beginning of that stage we have called emptiness, where the members empty themselves of their old ways of relating and start experimenting with new and better ways. Change and growth have been precipitated.
I suspect another source of the resistance on the part of the church to community building is that congregations do not want to go through the pain of chaos. It may not be so much that they desire to be pseudo-communities as that they are instinctively terrified of disintegration, and lack the motivation to hang in together through a period of chaos where everything seems to be falling apart. While churches may get by on chronic pseudocommunity, however, business cannot. Changing external conditions in the marketplace or internal conditions in the workforce routinely force businesses into crisis, but they do not then look forward to the next crisis, and they tend then to forget about maintaining themselves in community.
One of the things we need to do as we push toward Utopia is to dignify organizational chaos. I do not mean structural chaos. I mean the psychospiritual chaos that erupts in an organization when there is sufficient confusion over its vision, mission, myths, norms, and patterns of communication as to produce overt conflict among its members.
The work to dignify chaos has already begun. At the level of organization of subatomic particles, Ilya Prigogine has won a Nobel prize for his study of 'dissipative structures,' his term for a period of organizational breakdown through which such particles pass as they move to a higher energy state. And going up the system scale to our primary focus, there is Tom Peters's recent best-selling book about health and growth in business organizations, Thriving on Chaos.Chaos may not be an ideal state, but as has been noted, it is one step ahead of pseudocommunity, and a group cannot mature from pseudocommunity into a genuine community without going through it. I believe the managers of the future will actually learn and deliberately employ techniques to precipitate certain amounts of chaos or crisis when they sense their organizations need revitalization.
As businesses consider paying the price of community maintenance-the price of organizational health, preventive medicine, or ongoing civility-it may help them to refer back to theology and the nature of God. An individual who has developed a conscious relationship with God will probably be engaged in developing that relationship-often with anguish and struggle-for the rest of his or her everchanging life. Is it remarkable, then, that an organization that allows God into its midst will also need to continue to 'wrestle with the angel'?
The cutting edge in theology these days is called 'process theology.' Academicians tend to date the onset of this movement to the work of Alfred North Whitehead in the 1940's, although I suspect it goes way back before that. However, I began my journey into the process theology not by reading Whitehead or learning about it from any other kind of book, but through a combination of experience, intuition, and perhaps even revelation.
The moment was fifteen years ago, as I was sitting in my office with a thirty-five-year-old patient. She was a very attractive person, perhaps as much as eight pounds over the standard weight for women of her age and height. The preceding evening at a joyful restaurant party, she was so relaxed she had ordered and eaten an ice cream sundae for dessert. Now she was lamenting, 'How could I have been so stupid? After only six days I broke my diet! Now I have to start all over again. I hate myself for being so undisciplined. An ice cream sundae, for Christ's sake! Butterscotch sauce. Thick, gooey. I mean, I couldn't have chosen anything that had more calories. One of these days I'll.. .'
As she went on and on in this vein I found myself drifting off slightly, thinking how utterly typical she was of a large category of women whom I found sexually appealing, yet who spent endless ergs of energy obsessing about their weight, even about the most minor deviations in it. What was going on with them? In the midst of this wondering, I suddenly interrupted her, blurting out, 'What makes you think that God doesn't have to diet?'
She looked at me as if I'd gone crazy: 'Why'd you say that?' she asked.
I scratched my head, replying, 'I don't know.' But I had to think about why I'd said it, and as I did, I realized that I was onto something. I realized that my patient was laboring under a fantasy that if she read enough diet books or discovered just the right diet or received enough psychotherapy, then she would achieve a state where she could either eat all she wanted without gaining an ounce or else whenever she did gain that ounce, be able instantly and effortlessly to lose it. A strange fantasy, come to think of it. 'Maybe God puts on five pounds,' I explained to her, 'and then has to take them off. Only he doesn't make a big deal out of it, which is perhaps why he's God.'
That's how I stumbled onto process theology.
The illusion my patient labored under was a static notion of perfection. It is a very common but very destructive notion that perfection is an unchanging state. It is so common because it is so purely logical. If something is perfect and it changes, it can only become imperfect. But if something is truly perfect, it cannot, by definition, become imperfect. Hence perfection must be unchanging. And so we think, 'God is as God was and always will be.'
But it's not the way I think anymore. It's also hardly what the Bible suggests. And increasingly it's not what theologians are beginning to think. Thank God! If there is anything that characterizes life, it is change. As already mentioned, what most distinguishes the animate moves when you poke at it. It doesn't just sit there. It's alive. It goes this way and that way. It grows, it decays, it gets reborn. It changes. All life is in process. And since I choose to have a living God, I believe that my God is also in process, learning and growing and perhaps even laughing and dancing.
Why is this new concept of process theology so critically important? Because it means that it is good for organizations, like people, to be in a state of change. All organizations are in process, but the healthier they are, the more they will be in process. The more vibrant, the more lively they are, the more they will be changing. And the closer to perfection they are, the more rapidly they will be changing.
So, as we change our theology, we will come to expect our organizations to be in flux and in turmoil. We will know, not only in our heads but in our hearts, that if an organization lets God into itself, it will be welcoming even more flux and turmoil. We will know when we see a comfortable, complacent, particularly stable organization that it is undoubtedly in a state-or at least a phase-of decay. And if we see an organization that is suffering, struggling, searching this way and that for new solutions, one that is constantly revising and reviving itself, our tendency will not only be to give it the benefit of the doubt but to suspect that we may have stumbled upon a particularly godly institution.
For these same reasons, Utopia will not be stable or static. It will be evolving. It should not be thought of as a condition that we reach, because no sooner will we reach it than it will move on. It will not be a condition without suffering, without the stress and strain that inherently accompany change or development. Rather it will be a society moving with maximal vitality toward maximal vitality.
In summary, Utopia may not be impossible to achieve after all.
It will be impossible if we hold on to our traditional vision of perfection. In accord with this antiquated vision, Utopia in the past has generally been conceived as an isolated commune carved out within an otherwise imperfect world. Assets are held communally so that members are all economically equal. While the members work, the communal culture is antibusiness. There is no hierarchy, and consequently, no one is ever fired or 'excommunicated.'
The rules are so effective that the society is not only stable but unchanging. Although these rules may be considered to be divinely inspired, once in place there is no longer any role for God to play, any need for further divine intervention. There are no surprises and people need not struggle with each other toward a better future. In fact, there is no progress-since perfection. has already been reached. Civility has been legislated; hence, it is not an ongoing process but an effortless, painless static state.
No wonder such utopian ventures have always failed. They were based on false, unrealistic assumptions. They were antithetical to everything we know about real civility and real community. Maybe they also failed because they were insufferably dull.
Based on what we know about civility and have learned thus far about community, let me consolidate what has been said by offering a radically different utopian vision.
My Utopia of the future will always be in the future. This is because Utopia is not a state arrived at but a state of becoming. Indeed, we might think of Utopia as having already started. Barely.
The distinguishing feature of the citizens of Utopia is not their location, nationality, religion, or occupation but their commitment to becoming ever more civil individuals and their membership in a planetary culture of civility. By virtue of this commitment and membership, regardless of their theology, they welcome the active presence of God into both their individual and their collective lives. They believe in progress. They see themselves as growing psychospiritually. They are willing to accept the pain of growth and are eager for any surprising assistance they can receive from a Higher Power. They know they cannot go it alone without God or their fellow humans. Although their primary allegiance is to the development of their own souls, they are all involved in teaching as well as learning civility and dedicated to inviting others into their planetary culture.
They will teach civility wherever they can, as parents in families or educators in classrooms or parishioners in church. But as we move over toward Utopia, the primary role of teaching civility will be assumed by business. Business will assume this role out of self-interest as it learns the technology of community building and maintenance and just how cost-effective genuine civility is. Among their other missions, businesses will increasingly think of themselves as teaching and learning organizations. Eventually, the teaching of civility will become systematic-an integral part of the whole system of society-as the practice of community becomes endemic in business and the workplace. Every employee of any sizable business will automatically receive ongoing, on-the-job training in community as businesses increasingly operate in a community mode.
This does not mean that all will then be sweetness and light. People will continue to differ in their levels of competence. There will continue to be economic cycles and the necessity of layoffs. There will still be mental illnesses and the occasional devious individual who must be fired. What it does mean, however, is that gradually real civility both in and outside the workplace will become ever more common and incivility ever less normative. The kinds of advertisements cited early in the book, appealing to our baser natures, will cease to sell.
But one last stumbling block needs consideration as business organizations begin to lead the way in forging a planetary culture of civility.
When the two labor-management teams, after building community, independently decided that instead of coming to the table they would get rid of the table, they were doing something not only revolutionary but utopian. They also independently requested FCE to keep it secret. Correctly, I believe, they surmised that their work in community would not be trusted by their constituencies, the labor union and management as a whole, who were accustomed to traditional adversarialism and utterly unfamiliar with community. But this raises a question. How does a utopian organization honestly introduce itself to the larger society? The answer is, 'carefully.'
I think this political problem of organizational civility can best be analyzed in relation to the essentially uncivil but prevailing ethic of rugged individualism. Just as this fallacious 'ethic' (so antithetical to the principles of community) governs the behavior of most individual human beings, even more does it currently govern the behavior of organizations. They must pretend that they have it all together, that they are utterly in control of the situation, that they are totally competent. General Electric does not announce its internal problems. The United States doesn't admit that it has been wrong.
In the course of the community building this ethic is shattered. Men and women drop their masks of composure. They confess their problems. They become, with great relief, publicly comfortable with themselves as imperfect, burdened, struggling people. In doing this they also reveal to themselves and to each other what I have come to call 'the routine heroism of human beings.' In the same way, organizations that build themselves into communities come to see themselves as imperfect, wounded, and struggling agencies, companies, or corporations. The problem is that they then become increasingly uncomfortable presenting to the world a facade of constant composure and ostensible perfection. They know it is a front, a lie. How long do they maintain the pretense? And what should their political strategy be in giving it up?
The difficulty is not internal. Individuals building themselves into a community have considerable assurance of confidentiality: the knowledge of their 'sins' will be maintained internally, will be kept within the group. Part of the problem of `'re-entry,' however, is the issue of how they are going to behave when the workshop is over, when they leave it and reenter everyday society governed by the rules of rugged individualism. How do they now relate with the external world? They are usually a little more free, a little more honest, with a few selected people, but generally they put their masks back on, albeit somewhat less rigidly.
The problem for organizations is of similar kind but far greater magnitude. It is not that difficult for an organization to build itself into a community-even at all levels-so that every employee knows the company is in some way fragile, some ways wounded and hurting, and very much struggling, and feels proud to belong to such a company. But how should such a human and humane business relate with the external world and present itself to a public that expects high-gloss images of smoothness and perfection?
It is an intensely real problem. Even FCE, a nonprofit organization whose very purpose is community, must wrestle with it. We know ourselves to be a wounded organization.Yet our publications do not always reflect this reality. To what extent should our newsletter contain notes about how FCE's most recent Leaders' Roundtable was a meeting of unrelieved chaos? Or that the board member who recently resigned did so in anger? Or that the board and staff are in conflict? Or that we ended last year considerably in the red because ofan absurdly optimistic misjudgment of how many new large donors we would attract? Do we tell potential major donors that we desperately need their help because our financial situation is so shaky? Yes, some might want to help out. But many more would surely think, `I certainly wouldn't want to throw good money after bad, put it into a potentially sinking ship, or invest in an organization that doesn't have its act together!'
If FCE has this problem, think what it is like for a corporation whose shares sell on the New York Stock Exchange! How high-gloss do its publications need to be? How much attention must it pay to its image? (And how much of its profits must it divert from stockholders to maintain its image to these same stockholders?) How are we, as a society, going to solve this problem of corporate images and organizational hype?
How do we get to a world in which General Electric or General Motors or the U.S. government can acknowledge internal problems without being under the gun from investigatory reporters? When the nations of the world can learn to apologize to one another? If we are going to make any progress toward Utopia, it is a problem that must be solved. For the present, we are caught in a vicious cycle. In attempting to present false fronts of perfection, organizations teach the public to have unrealistic expectations of perfection, which further compel the organizations to create even glossier images to feed those expectations. And so it goes, round and round.
The way the problem is going to be solved is by organizational courage. The giant steps forward in the community building process are taken by those individuals of such courage that they are able to risk speaking at a level of vulnerability and authenticity at which no one in the group has spoken before. It only takes one individual at a time. As soon as she speaks at that level, then others in the group will follow, and shortly everyone will be talking that way. Then after a while, another individual will start speaking at a still deeper level of vulnerability and authenticity. Shortly he will be followed and everyone will be talking at that level also. And so the process will go for organizations. Someday an organization will be secure enough in itself to have the courage to dramatically cast away one of its images of invulnerability. As soon as other businesses see how it has gotten away with it, they will start to do likewise. And the whole culture will have begun to shift.
Primarily the shift will occur not merely because the world has seen that the vulnerable (internally as well as externally) business has gotten away with it, but because it has become extraordinarily successful in the process of doing so. We return to the concept that community in the workplace and organizational civility will succeed because it is cost-effective. In his work on servant leadership, Greenleaf posited that the world will be saved if it can develop just three truly well-managed, large institutions-one in the private sector, one in the public sector, and one in the nonprofit sector. Just one major profit-making corporation, one major government agency, and one charitable organization! He believed-and I know-that such excellence in management will be achieved through an organizational culture of civility routinely utilizing the mode of community. Such organizations will be so dramatically successful, that is, cost-effective, that their sister institutions-no matter how initially threatened-will flock to discover their secret and imitate them.
But we're far from there now. It's going to take us a long time before we can become such a civil society, before organizations as well as individuals are maximally vulnerable. Until then those organizations practicing community are going to have to wrestle continually with the political problem of how to function in a culture that is not yet comfortable with community or real civility. Until that time-and beyond that time-they will continue to need to struggle to figure out how to be, from moment to moment, organizations that are in the world but not of the world.
Extracted from M Scott Peck's A World Waiting to be Born
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