On Closing the Culture Gap

Paul Ehrlich, Seed Magazine, 2/9/11, 2/9/11

"Many are aware that climate disruption may cause horrendous problems, but few seem to realize that this peril is not the only potentially catastrophic one and may not even be the most serious threat we face. Humanity finds itself in a desperate situation, but you’d never know it from listening to the media and the politicians. Loss of the biodiversity that runs human life-support systems, toxification of the planet, the risk of pandemics that increase in lockstep with population growth, and the possibility of nuclear resource wars all could be more lethal. We are finally, however, starting to understand the patterns of culture change and the role of natural selection in shaping them. And since everything from weapons of mass destruction to global heating is the result of changes in human culture over time, acquiring a fundamental understanding of cultural evolution just might be the key to saving civilization from itself."

"That’s why a group of natural scientists, social scientists, and scholars from the humanities decided to inaugurate a Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB, pronounced “mob”). It was so named to emphasize that it is human behavior, toward one another and toward the ecosystems that sustain us all, that requires both better understanding and rapid modification. The idea is that the MAHB might become a basic mechanism to expose society to the full range of population-environment-resource-ethics-power issues, and sponsor research on how to turn that knowledge into the required actions. Perhaps most important, the MAHB would stimulate a broad global discussion involving the greatest possible diversity of people, about what people desire, the ethics of those desires, and which are possible to meet in a sustainable society. It would, I hope, serve as a major tool for altering the course of cultural evolution."

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Values and the Spirit of America

Anand Giridharas[1] was interviewed by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show several weeks ago. Toward the end of the interview, he said this:

“When we talk about India; when we talk about China in this country; we talk about the economic threats. We’re all obsessed with economic threats. We’re all concerned about emerging markets. I think the real thing that Americans need to think about is that these countries pose a challenge of culture, a challenge of spirit. Just look at the segment you did on culture and discourse in America. We are all engaged in pulling each other down. We’re creating a culture of destruction and pulling each other down. And, India and China for all the work that lies ahead of them, are starting to create cultures of hope, cultures of creation where there’s a consensus on how do we create something extraordinary. And, we need to not be worried about the economic threat but that spirit in about two and a half billion people.”

I think he’s right. Furthermore, I think that the talk about civility will achieve nothing without visiting the underlying values.

A culture can be thought of in terms of its elements: behavior (norms), values, beliefs and philosophy. Values are often misunderstood, adjudged good or bad, or confused with behaviors or beliefs. But values are the key to creating or changing a culture.

The following are things that I have learned about values[2]:

• Values individually are neutral
• Values are priorities (I value this over that.)
• There are over 100 human values
• Values come in two flavors – means (I value this way of doing things.) and goals (This is what I want to accomplish.)
• Values are derived from beliefs and are the proximate causes of behaviors
• Values in humans develop through maturation of beliefs (1. The world is a mystery that I must fear; 2. The world is a project that I must control; 3. The world is a project that I must join; 4. The world is a mystery that I must care for.) Not everyone, or every nation, matures through all four stages before they die.
• Values sets can create positive or negative behaviors (Good or bad behavior judged by the belief system of the culture.)
• Values operate dialectically in pairs (means and goals) to produce a third value (goal)
• Chains of pairs of values operating dialectically results in the preferred thrust of the culture
• Values are created, reinforced or destroyed by a leader’s actions or non actions
• Any member can become a cultural leader
• It takes a long time for cultural change to occur
• You can temporarily affect change in values with resources and projects
• You can make long term shifts in values with education, incentives, communication, infrastructure and measurements

We know a lot about human values and culture. So, are we building the nation we want and need for the future?

Only 10 – 20 years ago I would have told you that I thought we were moving into a stage three society (the world is a project in which we must participate) with hints of a stage four society (the world is a mystery that we must care for). But now we are being motivated by fear and control (stage 1 and stage 2 societies). It’s tempting, and too easy, to blame this on terrorism. I think the regression is internal and much more dangerous. Terrorism is being used as a tool.

In reality, what we know about culture and values is being used to build a new nation. Except it’s not operating in the open. It’s hidden. And, it’s utilizing the fear of some people of personal and organizational growth towards maturity. And, the ultimate goal is transfer of power and wealth.

Giridharas also talked about culture and spirit. What is meant by spirit?

According to Wikipedia, “Spirit has many different meanings and connotation, but commonly refers to the non-corporal essence of a being or entity.”

There were two things that I learned from interviews with the coaches of the super bowl teams a few weeks ago that shed some light on the subject of culture and spirit:

• Football is a game played by emotional men. The coach’s roll is to channel that emotional energy.
• A team develops spirit when the players stop playing for themselves and start playing for each other.

I think you could substitute life for football and people for men, and you’d still have some true statements.

As it turns out in the evolution of individuals and their organizations, commonly held values shift from a focus on self (selfishness or narcissism common in our culture now) to a focus on the other (all that is outside of ourselves).

Michael Novak’s Spirit of Democratic Capitalism provides some insight as well: “What do I mean by ‘democratic capitalism’? I mean three systems in one: a predominately market economy; a polity respectful of the rights the individual to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by the ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, and economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is pluralistic and, in the largest sense, liberal.”

One profound truth that emerges from Novak’s work is how delicate the balance is between democratic polity, capitalistic economy and a pluralistic society. And, any attempt to change this balance ought to be viewed with alarm.

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[1] Giridharas is the author of India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking. He writes the “Currents” column for The New York Times and its global edition, the International Herald Tribune: it explores fresh ideas, global culture and the social meaning of technology, among other subjects. In 2009, he completed a four-and-a-half-year tour reporting from India for The Times and the Herald Tribune, as their first Bombay presence in the modern era. He reported on India’s transformation, Bollywood, corporate takeovers, terrorism, outsourcing, poverty and democracy. He was appointed a columnist in 2008, writing the “Letter from India” series. In his article in the New York Times on 1/28/11, reflected on President Obama’s State of the Union address, “Obama Tries to Recapture a Lost Dream.

[2] Values are something we choose freely after considering the alternatives that we prize publicly, and that we act on immediately and repeatedly. The Genesis Effect, Brian Hall

In Praise of Positive Deviance

From Utne Reader, January-February 2011

"What's the key to transforming a community that's merely surviving into one that's thriving? Perhaps just a single person.

The September 2010 issue of Ode features an excerpt from the book The Power of Positive Deviance by Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin, and Monique Sternin. According to the authors, the theory of positive deviance holds that in every setting there's at least one person who strays from the norm-a positive deviant-someone who has found a way to buck the status quo and solve a problem despite the same odds that are stacked against everyone.

Such people have discovered crops able to survive the torrential conditions of floodplains and have transformed desert dunes into groves of saplings. These deviants don't have any special advantage-they just think outside the box. Positive deviance, the authors explain, "requires retraining ourselves to pay attention differently-awakening minds accustomed to overlooking outliers, and cultivating skepticism about the inevitable 'that's just the way it is:"

But identifying these statistical outliers isn't enough. The community needs to have a way to share the information, or the progress is simply isolated. The authors caution that "in the absence of a social process to disseminate innovation and incorporate it into the group repertoire, discovery bears few progeny:'

Positive deviance is most effective when a technical solution, such as a vaccine, doesn't exist, and where a problem is deeply rooted in the social fabric and mind-set of the culture. The concept has helped reduce gang violence in schools, corruption in Kenya, and minority dropout rates in California, proving that communities that are willing to embrace deviants can experience positive change."

The Power of Positive Deviance, Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin, and Monique Sternin, Harvard Business Press, 2010, 256pp

The Working Class

Hard times are good times to rethink our attitudes about the fungibility of workers.

Bette Lynch Husted, Oregon Humanities

"Our current economic hard times have touched everyone, but there’s no question that some have been hurt more than others. And it doesn’t look as if that’s going to change anytime soon. So I wonder: should those of us whose lives are a bit easier be thinking about the attitude behind the idea that workers are fungible? Or that, in a human version of “just-in-time” inventory, it’s more efficient to have them appear to perform a specific task and then disappear? Should we be questioning the ongoing waste of human creativity and skill, as well as the increasingly vast disparity of wealth in our country? Have we, gradually and almost without noticing, been lured into accepting the unacceptable?

And, if this isn’t the kind of culture we want, what might we do about that?

Political candidates get themselves into hot water if they speak about “redistributing the wealth,” but eventually an economy will self-destruct if this doesn’t happen, and continue to happen. “The gift must always move,” as Native American cultures have been trying to teach us. We balk at this idea at least partially because we have been carefully taught that those “others”—the people who cut our grass and trim our trees, cut our meat and pick our fruit, those who unpack the boxes and stock the shelves and stand behind the counter to sell us what we need—don’t deserve the kind of lives white-collar workers have. It’s a belief that threatens the meaningfulness of every life, including our own"

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The Reality of Complexity

This is a brief summary of two essays by Roger Lewin, The Reality of Complexity and Leading at the Edge: How Leaders Influence Complex Systems (coauthored with Birute Regine). Both of these essays refer to his two books on complexity, Weaving Complexity and Business: Engaging the Soul at Work, also coauthored with Birute Regine, and Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos.

In The Reality of Complexity, Lewin writes, “We argue that managers, consultants, entrepreneurs, executives, other business professionals indeed, anyone who works can take some comfort in the fact that they are not alone in riding a bucking bronco of change that demands a different understanding of the world. Science, too, is in the midst of an important intellectual shift, a true Kuhnian paradigm shift that parallels what is happening in business, or, more accurately, is the vanguard of that change. Where once the natural world was viewed as linear and mechanistic, where simple cause-and-effect solutions were expected to explain the complex phenomena of nature, scientists now realize that much of their world is nonlinear and organic, characterized by uncertainty and unpredictability. As in science, managers are discovering that their world is not linear but rather predominantly nonlinear, not mechanistic but rather organic and complex. It’s amazing how far we have been able to take the linear model for understanding the world, both in science and in business. But in the new economy, the limitations of the mechanistic model are becoming starkly apparent. A new way of thinking is required.

The realization that much of the world dances to nonlinear tunes has given birth to the new science of complexity, whose midwife was the power of modern computation, which for the first time allows complex processes to be studied. The science is still in its infancy, and is multifaceted, reflecting different avenues of study. The avenue most relevant to understanding organizational dynamics within companies and the web of economic activity among them is the study of complex adaptive systems. Simply defined, complex adaptive systems are composed of a diversity of agents that interact with each other, mutually affect each other, and in so doing generate novel behavior for the system as a whole, such as in evolution, ecosystems, and the human mind. But the pattern of behavior we see in these systems is not constant, because when a system’s environment changes, so does the behavior of its agents, and, as a result, so does the behavior of the system as a whole. In other words, the system is constantly adapting to the conditions around it. Over time, the system evolves through ceaseless adaptation.

Complexity scientists are learning about these dynamics of complex systems principally through computer models, but also through observation of the natural world. “That’s all fine and dandy for scientists and academicians,” one executive commented when we made this point, “but what’s it got to do with me and my problems?” The point is that business organizations are also complex adaptive systems. This means that what complexity scientists are learning about natural systems has the potential to illuminate the fundamental dynamics of business organizations, too. Companies in a fast-changing business environment need to be able to produce constant innovation, need to be constantly adapting, and be in a state of continual evolution, if they are to survive.”

He believes that relationships are the new bottom line. Not just who you are linked to but caring relationships driven by values. He notes, “We can restate this in the language of complexity science as follows: in complex adaptive systems, agents interact, and when they have a mutual effect on one another, something novel emerges. Anything that enhances these interactions will enhance the creativity and adaptability of the system. In human organizations this translates into agents as people, and interactions with mutual effect as being relationships that are grounded in a sense of mutuality: people share a mutual respect, and have a mutual influence and impact on each other. From this emerged genuine care. Care is not a thing but an action to be care-full to care about your work, to care for fellow workers, to care for the organization, to care about the community. We saw that genuine care enhanced the relationships in these companies, with CEOs engendering trust and loyalty in their people, and the people being more willing to contribute to the needs of the company. In the context of complexity science, care, which enhances relationships, in turn enhances companies’ creativity and adaptability.”

This is an extremely novel interpretation. We’ve had management based on science in the past with the result that people became abstracted to be a number and a replaceable cog in a machine. (Remember Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.) Now, complexity science may provide the justification for oft debated, human centered management.



“We can see, therefore, that management practice guided by complexity science leads us to a very human orientation, and this was a surprise, counterintuitive. Of course, there have been many human-centered approaches in management before, amongst the more notable being political scientist Mary Parker Follett’s work done in the 1920s and 1930s in the United States, in which there has been a recent resurgence of interest. For more than half a century, there has been a constant battle between human-oriented management and scientific or mechanistic management, with the latter prevailing. But it is only now, and for the first time, that there is a science behind this way of thinking that gives a legitimacy to the whole realm of human-centered management. With complexity science, we have human-oriented management practice emerging from science, a novelty.”

In Leading at the Edge, the authors write, “At the cusp of the twenty-first century, we are experiencing unprecedented structural shifts in our economy brought about by the revolutions in computation and communication technologies. Today the world is linked in ways unimaginable just a decade ago. A new kind of economy is emerging–the connected economy--a shift that rivals the onset of the Industrial Revolution in its impact on society and the way commerce is transacted. And with this shift, the business world finds itself in the throes of revolutionary change. Where once companies imagined themselves to be the master’s of their own destiny, in a connected economy companies find themselves as interdependent players in a fluid and vacillating economic web, where their fate, more than ever, is affected by the behavior of other members.

The change is not only real, but it is also accelerating, driven by rapid technological innovation, the globalization of business, and, not the least of it, the arrival of the Internet and the new domain of Internet commerce. Change–the pace of innovation, of forming and reforming alliances among companies, of corporate mergers, emerging markets–all driven by this connected economy, creates an environment of urgency in the workplace and a need to respond, adapt, anticipate that is unprecedented in the world of business as we knew it. Consequently, business leaders are preoccupied with change itself–how to generate it, how to respond to it, how to avoid being overcome by it. But, as Intel’s Andy Grove indicates, change is not exactly a welcome guest in business: "With all the rhetoric about change, the fact is that we managers hate change, especially when it involves us."

During these changing times, leaders and managers are finding many of their background assumptions and time-honored business models inadequate to help them understand what is going on, let alone how to deal with it. Where managers once operated with a Tayloresque mechanistic model of their world, which was predicated on linear thinking, control, and predictability, they now find themselves struggling with something more nonlinear, where limited control and a restricted ability to predict outcomes are the order of the day.

Consequently, many managers and executive professionals are uneasy and eagerly seeking new ways of dealing with change in their organizations, as the current $17 billion-a-year management consulting business would indicate. In the new connected economy, the limitations of the mechanistic model are becoming starkly apparent and a different mode of thinking is needed. In the connected economy of the twenty-first century, leaders cannot afford to try to succeed with management methods that were developed in a different age and for a different type of business environment.”

The authors conducted a study of organizations that exhibited some of the fundamental characteristics of a complexity science informed organization – “organizationally flat, have fewer levels of hierarchy, and promote open and plentiful communication and diversity. Complexity science argues that these properties enhance a system’s capacity for adaptability, thus, in the case of business, giving them a cutting edge in these fast-changing times. The companies we chose for our study therefore shared the properties of being organizationally flat and having rich, open communication. But we had no idea what we would find in the realm of organizational dynamics, of leadership and management style, and people’s work experience.

What we discovered was a style of leadership that unleashed enormous human potential in these organizations. We saw similar patterns among the leaders–CEOs, executive directors, chairmen, senior executives, managers–in how they worked with their business as a complex system. Because these patterns in leadership style emerged in companies of very different sizes and very different economic sectors, we infer that we are seeing something fundamental in how to lead change in organizations so that it is more adaptable and how to cultivate a culture in the workplace that is better able to embrace and create change.”

They found a way of leading change--an organic approach that is informed by complexity principles; and a style of leadership, paradoxical leadership that cultivates conditions for constructive change in organizations.

Later, the authors explain, “These elements of an organic approach for leading change are a different way of doing things in that these leaders didn’t make changes, they cultivated conditions for change to occur. Instead of implementing strategies or plans, they generated ambiguity and uncertainty, encouraged risks, attended to relationships which allowed the organization to rearrange itself. They engaged the whole person and forged connections between people which in turn made their organization more whole and connected.

If organizations are complex systems, leading in an interconnected, dynamic system requires a different way of being a leader. Leading in a dynamic system is more like an improvisational dance with the system rather than a mechanistic imperative of doing things to the system, as if it were an object that could be fixed. This casts the meaning of leadership itself in a different light that dispels certain beliefs and myths about what it means to be a leader in a traditional sense.”

The three myths of leadership that a complexity view dispels are autonomy, control, and omniscience.

The authors write, “What we have done is identify an intellectual framework, a scientific understanding of organizational dynamics that puts these behaviors under one umbrella of complexity, which shows why these behaviors are effective. We can see that these behaviors, such as mutuality and care, are efficacious in the business environment, not because being "nice" to people is a good and human thing to do, which, of course, it is; but because we are positively engaging the agents and the dynamics of the complex adaptive system, and moving the system toward the zone of creative adaptability.”

Culture Networks

By Tim Stock

An updated version of my lecture on Culture Networks for this semester’s Analyzing Trends class at Parsons the New School for Design.

Culture Networks 2010

View more presentations from Tim Stock.