Unfortunately the overwhelming majority of books, articles, and podcasts on business and economics fails to provide readers with an adequately broad spatiotemporal context, in order to allow them to apprehend the present and future profoundly enough, so that their present difficulties and challenges may truly transform them. It is my intention with this post to make one extremely modest contribution toward rectifying this situation.
In this post I will attempt the rather ambitious goal of accomplishing three things (or more precisely outlining three things). First, I will provide a rather superficial overview (because time is fleeting) of the genealogy of governmentality in the Western world, including a few of what I will call major principles or laws of social physics, starting from the “two great poles of historical-religious sovereignty,” the Empire and the Church. Second, I will cover in some detail the challenges of accelerating complexity and the urgent need for unorthodox structures and behaviors in our institutions. And third, I will highlight very briefly some current efforts to develop a more inclusive, egalitarian, and imaginative knowledge economy through democratization.
Because our current managerial models and organizational cultures still carry so much psychological inertia from the past, I will now begin with a rough sketch of the genealogy of governmentality in the Western world.
The Genealogy of Governmentality
20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault originally formulated the expression governmentality by combining the terms government and rationality. Government in this sense refers to conduct, or an activity meant to shape, guide, or affect the conduct of people. Conduct takes on meaning beyond the form of leading and directing.
In this section, I will provide a cursory overview of what Foucault referred to as the genealogy of governmentality, starting from the “two great poles of historical-religious sovereignty,” the Empire and the Church. I will also mention a few of the major principles of social physics.
At all levels (whether society, community, or family) fractal organizational configurations are self-similar (like the branches of a tree) and they are often found in societies. They generally inherit with variations from strong archetypal structures or common metaphors. The Empire and the Church serve as such foundational structures in Western Civilization, and thus keep repeating fractally through space and time, representing two poles, or metaphors, in the Western mind.
A myriad of counter-conducts eventually resulted in “the disappearance of the two great poles of historical religious sovereignty that dominated the West and promised salvation, unity, and the fulfillment of time.”
In this section, I will detail several aspects of the genealogy of governmentality. First, I will expand the definition of the term “counter-conduct”, meaning a “counter-conduct in the sense of struggle against the procedures implemented for conducting others.” Second, I will summarize the pastoral counter-conducts of the Middle Ages, which Foucault presents, including (a) asceticism; (b) communities; (c) mysticism; (d) Scripture; and (e) eschatological beliefs. Third, I will emphasize the inseparable relationship of conduct and counter-conduct; counter-conducts are not merely negative or reactive phenomenon; counter conduct goes beyond the purely negative act of disobedience, playing a productive role in dynamic tension with conduct. Fourth, I will discuss “eccentricity of conduct” as John Stuart Mill’s name for counter-conduct, and his recognition that conformity weakens the possibility of resistance. Fifth, I will describe how the institutions for conducting men (as well as governmentality), and the counter-conducts that were opposed to this, developed in correlation with each other. And sixth, I will identify some of the most significant revolts of conduct in the West, including the Renaissance, when scholars from outside the Church rediscovered Greek and Roman learning; the Protestant Reformation, reflecting the desire to return the Church to what it was before it became Roman; the embryonic forms of pre-modern capitalism; the birth of “disciplinary societies” and vast spaces of enclosure during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the traumatic appearance of fossil-fueled industrial capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century; and today’s Digital Revolution.
Following on the intrinsic correlation between conducts and counter-conducts, I will next discuss the current need for “eccentricity of conduct”.
The Urgent Need for Unorthodoxy
The near total dominance of the established conducts over the counter-conducts during the past two generations, particularly in the Western world, combined with accelerating unpredictability hastens the urgent need to adopt unorthodox structures and behaviors in society and the economy. In this section, I will cover, first, one of the primary precipitating causes, namely accelerating complexity and unpredictability due to digitalization, as well as a general description of some of the unorthodox structures and behaviors that have been implemented in some fashion in more forward thinking organizations, in order to minimize the risks while maximizing the opportunities.
Accelerating Complexity
The world has become complex, interdependent, hyperconnected, and unpredictable, and technology has put human beings on a trajectory that they may not be really prepared or willing to handle. In this subsection, I will cover briefly the risks that accelerating complexity poses to the doctrine of high efficiency and the crisis of enclosures in organizations, as well as the opportunities available to those rare organizations that are willing and able to understand and cultivate the organic power of emergent complexity.
Unorthodox Structures
Unpredictability renders reductionist managerial models obsolete despite the psychological inertia of the organizational cultures which still cling to them. In this subsection, I cover two concepts that I call tactical adaptability and full organizational agility, respectively. Because this is what most progressive organizations are attempting to varying degrees, I will start with tactical adaptability.
Tactical Adaptability
More and more organizations recognize the need for responsiveness and agility. Using General Stanley McChrystal’s “team of teams” as the primary example and the scaled agile transformation as the secondary example, I describe briefly eight (8) aspects of these approaches. First, I discuss the general response to unpredictability in industry. Second, I describe the challenge of overcoming the constraints of teams. Third, I explore the achievement of adaptability with teams. Fourth, I discuss how to harness the capability of dispersed organizations. Fifth, I describe the “team of teams” approach to overcoming the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Sixth, I describe the largely obvious benefits of empowering those closest to problems to decide and act. Seventh, I list some of the evolutionary models in the area of tactical adaptability. And finally eighth, I explore how a “team of teams” or agile transformation will ultimately fail to overcome the command and control which hinders organizational agility. In an earlier post, I explore agile transformations and their limitations in greater detail.
Full Organizational Agility
Developing comprehensive organizational agility is difficult. Catalyzing organizational change of increased international coordination and cooperation with strong executive level support, something which I did in China, is qualitatively different from developing comprehensive organizational agility with limited executive level support. Using the “team of teams” paradigm as a mental model, I describe six (6) ideas related to the achievement of full organizational agility. First, I identify some of the limitations of the prior approach, which I called tactical adaptability. Second, I explore how these limitations serve to impede organizational agility. Third, I discuss the benefits of valuing the health and resilience of ecosystems. Fourth, I explore the significant benefits of cultivating organizational agility. Fifth, I describe how a yin-yang symmetry of shared consciousness and authorized execution, which extends to the hierarchically arranged strategic layers, unlocks the historically untapped potential of collective human intelligence. And sixth, I list some of the alternative forms of ownership models in use which could facilitate this transition.
To thrive, these unorthodox structures must also share a yin-yang symmetry with a set of unorthodox behaviors, which I explore next.
Unorthodox Behaviors
Exchanges within a network of trusted social ties facilitates idea flow which eventually develops an inclusive, vigorous culture of collective intelligence. In this subsection, I cover six (6) activities related to the development of these urgently needed unorthodox behaviors. First, I will sketch out how humans shape themselves with narrative structures. Second, I describe Homo imitan and how exposure to the example behaviors of other people predicts human behavior. Third, I outline how the sampling of other collective intelligences enables human culture to grow. Fourth, I describe how “beehive management” patterns build high performance cultures. Fifth, I explore how facilitating idea flow develops an inclusive culture of collective intelligence. And sixth, I describe how in unpredictable complex situations employing complexity theory, anthropology, ethnographic inquiry, and social network theory can help to manage the evolutionary potential of the situated present. In my last post, I provide more details on social learning and the role of narrative.
Now that I have discussed the urgent need for unorthodoxy, I will next outline some current efforts to develop a more inclusive, egalitarian, and imaginative knowledge economy, which would support these unorthodox structures and behaviors.
Democratizing the Knowledge Economy
The knowledge economy does not have to be confined and contained as it is now; an alternative approach could democratize it. So that many more people, places, and firms can participate in and shape the economy, a forward thinking industrial policy could aim to transform the institutions of the market economy. An inclusive knowledge economy requires a broad-ranging agenda of six (6) activities to democratize the economy. First, I will discuss SMEs and their capacity and skills, including the adoption of new methods and technologies at every level of the economy. Second, I will examine the transformation of industrial policy to address the new concentrations of power, focusing on the prevention of monopoly and predatory behaviors. Third, I will describe the need to transform and disaggregate property rights so that different stakeholders can make partial claims on the same productive resources, i.e. commoning. Fourth, I will discuss the need to reform education to prepare the next generation for the future, emphasizing mindsets, skills and cultures relevant to the future economy. Fifth, I will explore the need to reform social policy to respond to new patterns of work and need, focusing on more flexible systems that can handle rapid change. And sixth, I will describe the need to reform the government and democracy to achieve new levels of participation, agility, experimentation, and effectiveness.
Takeaway
“The difference between past, present and future is an illusion for us scientists, albeit a stubborn one.”
Albert Einstein
History shows that when members of a ruling class or the self-anointed “masters of mankind” construct a system which restricts the forms and degrees of counter-conduct in the economy and society for extended periods of time, for instance decades, generations, or even centuries, their persistent egomania, avarice, and megalomania prepare the circumstances for the decomposition of the very system from which they have obscenely profited, leading ultimately to the death of their excessive lifestyle, and the birth of either a more inclusive and egalitarian economy and society or a protracted Dark Period; when evolutionary counter-conducts are hindered, revolutionary counter-conducts appear.
It is the present in which we travel as it were on the stream of time: we remember the past; we expect the future. We believe in having a certain influence on them; the past, so our memory tells us, is immovably firm. In between lies the now, the moment of action, of freedom, of self-realization, in which the future is reworked in the past.
15.05.1989
„Eine hartnäckige Illusion“ (“A stubborn illusion”)
Das Zeit-Bild der modernen Physik, Der Spiegel
