Beyond Survival

Beyond Survival

A short course in Pioneering in Response to the Present Crisis

International Futures Forum

Graham Leicester

Beyond Survival

A short course in Pioneering in Response to the Present Crisis

Graham Leicester

International Futures Forum

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Introduction

This feels like a moment of truth. For many years people have been warning that we live in extraordinary times, a change of age not just an age of change. My own organisation, International Futures Forum, has been amongst them – quietly advocating the need for radically different approaches to intractable problems in a world where we are off our familiar charts.

My colleagues and I have worked in various parts of the world with a wide variety of people up for the challenge of developing new practice. It has been hugely rewarding and inspiring work. But thus far it has sat on the fringes of the main event. Business as usual has maintained its steady course, as powerful systems generally do.

Now things feel different. Talk of change is everywhere and so is talk of meltdown and chaos. The Nobel economist Paul Krugman recalls similar sentiments expressed by Keynes in the 1930s crash: ‘We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.’ As Krugman says, ‘both statements are as true now as they were then’. Maybe this is the turning point - when the bankruptcy of conventional wisdom becomes clear?

It was certainly clear in a workshop we ran recently playing the IFF World Game. We appointed a group of twelve ‘Presidents’ to form a world government for the day. Their portfolios covered the critical elements in the global system - including food, energy, climate, wealth, trade, community, wellbeing etc. Each President was asked to do some research and then report back on any potential crises or disruptive tipping points in their area.

Each report back became more vivid. Presidents were outbidding each other on the inevitable road to global catastrophe. The financial

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crisis began to seem like the least of our worries. The fact we were only playing a game is crucial at this point – it allows a space to be more playful and creative in the face of challenge. Ordinarily we would have become paralysed by fear

We are programmed at such moments to adopt one of three responses. The first is defensive: we deny our confusion, reinforce our certainty, stick ever more doggedly to what we know. We become fundamentalists. A second response is even less rational and can become destructive: we throw up our hands in despair, we admit things are just too confusing and decide to remain lost. We eat drink and make merry – because we cannot face up to the reality of what we sense is going on in the world.

There is another possible response to challenging times. It is about growth and transformation. We can acknowledge that we are confused and that times are hard. But we don’t tune the confusion

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out or deny it. Instead we find the courage to face it head on and the determination to learn and grow our way through it. And when we commit to that path it is astonishing how often we discover strengths we did not think we had.

Learning means taking a wider view, and that can be scary. But when we are able to do so it allows us to reperceive the way things are. We begin to see the present financial crisis as just one more symptom of a world we no longer understand and cannot control. As such it may serve as a wake-up call to those who still think today’s problems can be satisfactorily addressed with yesterday’s solutions.

This short pamphlet outlines in four lessons the elements of a strategy for emerging from the current crisis stronger. The first step is survival. The next is generating fresh insight. The third is maintaining the will to act and to persevere. And finally I write about hope, without which we cannot even start the journey.

Now is a time for many strategies. Some will batten down the hatches and hope the storm will pass. Some will look to innovate their way into new opportunities. But we also need some pioneers – who have the vision to invest in the future rather than prop up the past, and the confidence to translate that vision into action. What follows is a short course in pioneering.

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Lesson one: survivAL

I have lost count of the number of senior figures in recent weeks who have told me they are not interested in new ideas just at the moment thank you. Their first priority is survival.

Fair enough. They need to batten down the hatches, concentrate on the short term, look after the staff, cut costs – keep their organisations viable while planning for recovery.

They evidently don’t know much about survivors. Studies of accidents, plane crashes, ship wrecks, people who get lost in the wilderness etc show that those who decide to sit still and wait for things to get better are far more likely to perish. Rule one for survivors is ‘discard the hope of rescue’.

That is a challenging stance – which is why we don’t generally go there. But think about the costs of waiting for rescue. It leaves you as a victim in your own eyes. It relieves you of the need to make sense of the condition you find yourself in. It clothes you in false comfort. And ultimately, if things don’t improve, it leads to growing anxiety, panic and finally resignation as it becomes clear the moment for effective action has long gone and rescue is not on the way.

All a bit gloomy, I’m afraid. So if you are committed to survival in these difficult times, don’t go about it that way.

What’s the alternative? Many survival schools (which are enjoying boomtime business, incidentally, since the prophets of planetary doom found their voices) use the acronym STOP: stop, think, observe, plan… and then, crucially, act.

The first three are linked. They are about coming to terms with new circumstances. We automatically resist this. It is something about maintaining our emotional stability: we do not like to admit to

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being confused. People who wander off the trail and get lost almost never turn back. They press on, convincing themselves that they are still on track and that they will come across a landmark on the trail just around the next corner. This is called ‘bending the map’. Survivors don’t make the mistake of imposing existing patterns on new information.

To maintain that level of awareness, however, is tricky. It requires a recognition that our emotions condition our thinking. We are more likely to believe what we feel than what we know. And when we are in danger, or under pressure, or anxious, our emotions tend to crowd out rational thought. That’s why fighter pilots have such intensive training, so that the right thing to do becomes instinctive when the

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body is suffused with fear. As one instructor says, ‘when you climb inside the cockpit your IQ rolls back to that of an ape’.

That’s why it is important to slow down, to maintain the balance between emotions and reason. And observe. Really observe. Don’t just see what you expect to see, what you hope to see. Make sense of your situation anew.

This is where new thinking comes in. The US author Malcolm Gladwell writes pithily about the ability to perform under pressure: ‘choking [in sport] is a result of thinking too much. Panic is a result of thinking too little’. So let’s try to think just enough. In a way that acknowledges the new landscape around us since the financial crisis hit and with an emotional quality that allows our understandable fear and anxiety to express itself in creative impulse rather than blinkered denial.

New thinking is a survival strategy. In fact it is the survival strategy. Is anybody interested now?

Further reading: Laurence Gonzales: Deep Survival – who lives, who dies, and why?

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Lesson Two: insighT

We sit in the eye of the financial crisis and a growing recession, waiting for the upturn and the recovery to begin. The top three priorities of most organisations are the same: survival, survival and survival.

So we might as well do ‘survival’ properly. I wrote in the previous chapter about the extensive research on the qualities of survivors – how they react to danger, how they think and respond in a crisis, what they do and how they pull through. There are clues here for what constitutes intelligent behaviour at this time for any organisation.

The survival drama has three acts. Act One is the descent into chaos. Act Two is confusion, commitment to survival and the subsequent struggle. Act Three brings us, at last, to re-emergence into safety.

The critical task at the entry to Act Two is to maintain the energy and adrenalin that fear generates, but not to descend into panic. Manage the anxiety, take a long hard look at the situation, recognise that you are off the familiar map and generate the one thing that is going to help you survive: fresh insight.

Most of us are not in life and death situations. But the task in the current crisis is just the same. The sudden disruption in the financial system is just one instance of fragility in global systems now so complex and tightly coupled they are always running in failure mode. We hope that the little failures don’t snowball – but things are bound to collapse from time to time.

The important thing is how we respond. Most people are in denial: carry on and hope for the best. Others commission extensive research, analyse trends, develop future scenarios. But that too is of

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no value if it simply feeds complacency in the present: ‘It’s OK, we did the scenarios exercise and we’re future proofed’.

No you’re not. Because what we need to be prepared for is unpredictable, disruptive change. That is what triggers a crisis. And at that point it is your instincts that kick in – who you are, not what you know. If you have a habit of relying on plans and numbers you will cling on to them more tightly than ever. But if you are a survivor, you will adapt to the new circumstance. You will take careful stock of the new situation. What is this place? What opportunities does it offer? What sense can I make that will allow me to take the first step out of the crisis rather than just waiting for it to pass?

How can we do that? We can take a longer term perspective – recognising that our sense of the future inevitably colours our reading of the present. We can start to notice things we have previously missed through inattention, prejudice or cultural habit. Psychiatrists notice subtleties of behaviour that others miss, for example. Naturalists notice entire ecologies on the underside of a leaf. Recognising that we typically have a limited view and taking steps to

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identify our blind spots and alternative ways of perceiving expands the space in which fresh insight may emerge.

And insight is not inert. It is not ‘blue skies’ thinking. Insight demands action. And that in turn will bring something new into the world and provide the source for new scanning and fresh insight. Our first steps will kick start a learning cycle. We cannot plan but we will learn our way out of crisis.

Further reading: Don Michael: On Learning To Plan and Planning To Learn

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Lesson Three: PerseverAnce

Up to now I have treated ‘survival’ broadly as a metaphor. But we also know that the downturn will be truly testing. We will all be more stressed, some will become depressed, suicides will rise. New thinking and fresh insight are crucial for future prosperity. But so too will be actions to look after ourselves, to maintain our energy to persevere, and to care for the wounded.

Over-dramatic? I don’t think so. In the year following the 1929 market crash 23,000 Americans committed suicide, still the largest figure in a single year. Not necessarily Wall St bankers (although there were plenty of them) but farmers who lost their farms, ordinary workers who lost their jobs, entrepreneurs who lost their businesses.

The same is already happening here. At the end of September the Mail on Sunday graphically reported the death of Kirk Stephenson: ‘credit crunch banker leaps to his death in front of express train’. And even the normally upbeat Luke Johnson, Chairman of Risk Capital Partners, was clearly shaken in writing about an acquaintance hit hard by the downturn: ‘His company was made bankrupt just a few weeks ago. So now he sits at home in his leather armchair, hitting the vodka by 11am, mired in boredom, self-pity and regret. His existence has gone from one of frantic activity to complete emptiness – no money, no confidence and no energy.’

We know this is a risk. The warning signals have been mounting for decades. The World Health Organisation suggests that by 2020 depression will be second only to heart disease as a source of illness and premature death in the world. Rising levels of divorce, family breakdown, burnout, stress, drink and drug problems, domestic and other violence, accidents at work, absenteeism, diagnosed depression, mental illness and suicide – all have been steadily rising to global

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epidemic proportions. We live in powerful times and we are not coping well.

We effectively face a choice between awareness and growth or denial and decline. Denial and decline occur when we stop learning – responding to new challenges with the same old routines. When our certainties are threatened we have a natural tendency to invest in them even more heavily. In organisations this shows up as micro-managing systems of accountability in order to regain control: stricter discipline and closer oversight, more metrics, harder work. But in example after example we see that the results of this turning of the screw simply leading to increased pressure on organisations and individuals.

We must be able to rise above this instinctive neurotic defence. Ian Mitroff ’s leading edge work on crisis management in organisations confirms that lesson: ‘You can and will survive – even prosper – but if, and only if, you are prepared emotionally, physically, intellectually, and spiritually.’

Mitroff ’s ‘seven essential lessons for surviving disaster’ apply equally to individuals, corporations, maybe even societies. The first is ‘right heart’ – emotional resilience. Another is ‘right soul’ – ‘effective crisis management requires a special type of inner spiritual growth. Nothing devastates the soul as much as a crisis.’ These are lessons derived from over 25 years of experience. They point to the fact that even complex organisations can do ‘inner work’ to build their capacity and resilience.

With today’s moment in mind, IFF was commissioned by the World Economic Forum back in 2004 to develop a set of resources to grow inner strength in organisations, communities and individuals. Such resources are badly needed now. Whether suffering the shock of being

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let go, or the stress of being one of those left behind, inner resources can both ease the pain of loss and maintain health and resilience in the face of what comes next. The good news here is: we all have the untold and usually untapped inner resource to manage this. Even better news is that the best way to survive a crisis is to help somebody else do the same.

Further reading: Ian Mitroff: Why Some Companies Emerge Stronger and Better from a Crisis: seven essential lessons for surviving disaster

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Lesson Four: hoPe

And finally comes the poet. So wrote Walter Brueggemann, the Old Testament scholar, about what he called ‘the prophetic imagination’. His contribution to the survival debate is less about technical skills and more about inspiration and leadership. But without these there is no point in surviving.

The role of the prophet is threefold. To warn about the dangers and iniquities of the existing system. To paint a desirable vision of the promised land. And to maintain energy and commitment in the people during the 40 years in the wilderness it will take to make the transition.

This is the role of imagination, and of hope.But before I come over all Obama, let’s get technical. When

business as usual systems and practices begin to fail the task is to innovate. Managers must keep the present system running while the innovators get to work fashioning new offerings better suited to the times. Clayton Christensen identifies the moment when the new offerings become more successful than the legacy product as a ‘disruption’.

What Brueggemann adds to this model is a third horizon. The first horizon is failing. The second is innovating. But if there is no vision of a desirable third to which an innovation is heading, change is merely opportunistic.

The third horizon makes a distinction between ‘innovation’ that props up the old system and innovation that paves the way to a new, sustainable system fit

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for changed times. Without a third horizon vision pulling us forward there can be no such distinction and all innovation will inevitably draw us backwards towards the past.

The philosopher Jonathan Lear tells the story of Plenty Coups, chief of the Crow Indians at the end of the 19th century as his tribe came under pressure from the white man to give up their way of life and enter the reservation. It was a moment of cultural crisis. The bottom dropped out of the Crow Indian world.

Plenty Coups described the transition many years later: ‘when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again’. As one Crow woman put it: ‘I am trying to live a life I do not understand’.

Some tribes gave in to despair and accepted the white man’s superiority – throwing in their lot with ‘business as usual’. Resistance was futile. Some – like Sitting Bull and the Sioux – chose to go down fighting. To the bitter end, as it turned out. Their vision of the third horizon was psychotic and destructive rather than aspirational. Neither was successful in negotiating a cultural transition.

But Plenty Coups had a dream that although the buffalo would vanish, provided they kept attuned to changing conditions the Crow would come through to find a new way of living. Lear calls this ‘radical hope’ – the hope for cultural rebirth, but without any predetermined vision of what that rebirth will look like. In the event Crow youth learned the white man’s law, negotiated favourable settlements, maintained far more of their land than any other tribe and came to reinvent notions of honour and courage in a world without warriors.

Lear writes: ‘There may be various forms of ethical criticism that one might be tempted to level at this form of hopefulness: that it was too complacent; that it didn’t face up to the evil that was being

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inflicted on the Crow tribe. But it is beyond question that the hope was a remarkable human accomplishment – in no small part because it avoided despair’.

I regard this as a story for our times. As the skies turn dark and the ‘imminent collapse of civilisation’ literature grows, we too are in need of inspiration if we are to avoid the predictable future. How else can we interpret the swell of emotion around the world at the election of Obama? Mario Cuomo said that we campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Nobody denies that. But we do need both. Without the poetry, the vision, we have no third horizon. And we have no hope. The authentic voice in Obama’s poetry awakens that same authentic voice in us.

Which brings me to the most vital part of the story of how we might navigate our way through the present crisis ‘toward the hope of a better day’. We need to find among us individuals and organisations willing to connect their actions today to a vision that is more than a patched up version of the past. These are the pioneers.

Where innovators and entrepreneurs are opportunistic, pioneers are visionary. They display all the characteristics I have talked about in these pages. They are not waiting to be rescued. They are aware of the larger, shifting context for their actions. They are not afraid of big thoughts and wide ambition. They have strong values that feed their capacity to persevere through good times and bad. They provide inspiration to others. They are the individuals who turn radical hope into reality.

Further Reading: Jonathan Lear: Radical Hope – ethics in the face of cultural devastation

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IFF Members

Martin Albrow Formerly Professor of Sociology, State University of New York, Stony Brook, author ‘The Global Age: state and society beyond modernity’

Tony Beesley Conceptual artist and cartoonist

Max Boisot Adjunct professor of Asian Business and Comparative Management at INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France, author ‘Knowledge Assets: securing competitive advantage in the information economy’

Roberto Carneiro Former Education Minister, President of Grupo Forum, Portugal, UNESCO International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century

Napier Collyns Co-founder, Global Business Network (GBN), California

Brian Goodwin Schumacher College, Devon and Santa Fe Institute, author ‘How the Leopard Changed its Spots: the evolution of complexity’

Bo Gyllenpalm President SITSERV AB, Sweden and faculty member Fielding Graduate University, USA

Mike Hambly Business consultant, formerly Chief Executive, Digital Animations Group, Glasgow

Margaret Hannah Deputy Director of Public Health, NHS Fife, Scotland

Pat Heneghan Director, ForthRoad Limited, Scotland

Rebecca Hodgson Researcher, International Futures Forum

Tony Hodgson Director, Decision Integrity limited, founder Metabridge AB

Robert Horn Visiting Scholar, Stanford University, author Visual Language: global communication in the 21 st century

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Kees van der Heijden Professor at Templeton College, Oxford, author ‘Scenarios: the art of strategic conversation’

Adam Kahane Generon Consulting and Reos Partners, author of Solving Tough Problems

Pat Kane Writer, theorist and musician, Glasgow, author The Play Ethic

Eamonn Kelly President, Global Business Network, California, author ‘Powerful Times: rising to the challenge of our uncertain world’

Rajiv Kumar Director, Indian Council for Research in International Economic Relations (ICRIER)

Graham Leicester Director, International Futures Forum, formerly HM Diplomatic Service

David Lorimer Scientific and Medical Network, Scotland, editor ‘Thinking Beyond the Brain: a wider science of consciousness’

Charles Lowe Consultant, Former head of e-government BT

Wendy Luhabe Chancellor, University of Johannesburg, South Africa, author ‘Defining Moments: experiences of black executives in South Africa’s workplace’

Andrew Lyon Converger, International Futures Forum, formerly Deputy Director, Forward Scotland

Arun Maira Boston Consulting Group, Delhi, India, author ‘Shaping the Future: aspirational leadership in India and beyond’

Wolfgang Michalski WM International, formerly Director, OECD International Futures Programme

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Maureen O’Hara President Emerita, Saybrook Graduate School and Professor of Psychology, National University, San Diego, California

Aftab Omer President, Institute of Imaginal Studies, California

Ian Page Former Research Manager / Futurist, HP Corporate Labs.

Nick Rengger Professor of Political Theory and International Relations, University of St Andrews, author ‘International Relations, Political Theory and the Problem of Order’

Vineeta Shanker Economist and researcher, faith and globalisation, World Faith Development Dialogue

Bill Sharpe Independent researcher in science, technology and society

Jennifer Williams Director, Centre for Creative Communities, UK

Mark Woodhouse Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Georgia State University, USA, author ‘Paradigm Wars: worldviews for a new age’

Publishers

Triarchy Press is an independent publishing house that looks at how organisations work and how to make them work better – both internally and in relation to each other and their environment. We present challenging perspectives on organisations in short and pithy, but rigorously argued, books.

The name ‘Triarchy’ comes from our founder Gerard Fairtlough’s theory that challenges the hegemony of hierarchy in organisations and puts forward two alternative ways of organising power and responsibility in order to get things done: heterarchy and responsible autonomy. Our publications offer a number of different but related approaches to organisational issues from the fields of systems thinking, innovation, cultural theory, complexity and leadership studies.

Through our partnership with IFF we seek to continue the practices of breaking with established norms and finding new ways of responding to our surroundings: practices that are becoming increasingly important as our natural, economic and social systems become more volatile and unpredictable. These challenges require an attitude that embraces the potential of change rather than retreating towards familiarity and stagnation, and that gives the potential for intelligent and innovative preparation for the future. IFF’s thinking and writing is already taking significant steps towards this end and we welcome the opportunity to work together with IFF on this and future publications.

Please tell us what you think about the ideas in this book. Join the discussion at:

www.triarchypress.com/telluswhatyouthink

[email protected]

International Futures Forum

International Futures Forum (IFF) is a non-profit organisation established to support a transformative response to complex and confounding challenges and to restore the capacity for effective action in today’s powerful times.

At the heart of IFF is a deeply informed inter-disciplinary and international network of individuals from a range of backgrounds covering a wide range of diverse perspectives, countries and disciplines. The group meets as a learning community as often as possible, including in plenary session. And it seeks to apply its learning in practice.

IFF takes on complex, messy, seemingly intractable issues – notably in the arenas of health, learning, governance and enterprise – where paradox, ambiguity and complexity characterise the landscape, where rapid change means yesterday’s solution no longer works, where long term needs require a long term logic and where only genuine innovation has any chance of success.

Authors

Graham Leicester is Director of International Futures Forum. He is a former member of HM Diplomatic Service and has subsequently developed a special interest and wide experience in the areas of governance, innovation, education and the arts.

Tony Beesley is a conceptual artist and IFF’s resident cartoonist.

International Futures Forum

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© International Futures Forum 2009

Published by Triarchy Press Ltd.