The Dangers of a Single Story: Shifting the Organizational Metaphor — Part I
New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities.
~George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By
May the best among us, the most visionary, the most inclusive, be the imaginal cells — for now we are in the soup. The outcome of disasters is not foreordained. It’s a conflict, one that takes place while things that were frozen, solid and locked up have become open and fluid — full of both the best and worst possibilities. We are both becalmed and in a state of profound change. ~Rebecca Solnit
It’s now more than two and a half years since Covid 19 swept across the globe wiping out the known, the ‘normal’ and the ‘business-as-usual’. It was a point of discontinuity, a disruption, an imposed pause on a world heedlessly going towards disaster. The warning signs of floods, fires, and furies had gone unheeded by a neoliberal capitalist economy hell-bent on taking the planet to hell in a handbasket. The homogenous narrative running the show — dreamed up by a handful of European men and imposed on the rest of the planet as an imperial and colonial project — has brought us to a point of disaster with a rapidity unknown in other periods.
Climate activists staging shocking protests — like throwing tomato soup on a Van Gogh painting — are trying to draw attention to the catastrophe a handful of the powerful has plunged the world into. Whether we agree with their method or not, it is undeniable that we are teetering on the very edge of calamity. The ecological apocalypse had been gathering force for decades at an ever-increasing pace. Needless to say, those least responsible for today’s multiple and simultaneous crises are paying the heaviest price. Vulnerable global south nations reel under the relentless assault of a planet striking back. Brutal heat waves in India and Pakistan and deadly floods and landslides in South Africa have left hundreds dead and thousands homeless. And it goes on.
The tragedy, however, lies in humanity’s hubris — in the indefensible denial of science, disavowal of ways of knowing beyond the Western epistemology, of technology’s power to do good. The onward march of technological innovation has become inversely proportional to the quality of life on this planet when it should have been the opposite. Technology has been used to dredge the ocean floors, blow up mountains, bring about industrial farming and monoculture wiping out species incredibly important to the health of the soil, and much more. AI and Big Data — while failing spectacularly during the pandemic — are being efficiently used as tools of surveillance to track human behavior.
This dystopian, technocratic world has been created by a few. The very consciousness driving this show stems from a lust for power, obscene greed for wealth, and a limitless sense of entitlement. These ‘men’ — they are mostly men — are chasing endless power, immortality, and colonization of space in the face of unfolding calamity on this planet, our home. Their lunatic fantasies are causing the collapse of a civilization. The narrative of endless profit, power and privilege driving the show has run its irrational course. And it’s time to reimagine our civilizational narratives.
I am using ‘narratives’ in the plural very deliberately. For too long and to the detriment of all sentient life, the world affairs have been run by a homogenous, European worldview — advocating separation from nature and from one another, glorifying the power of reason and the ability to harness the planet’s resources, and promoting profit and endless growth in the guise of progress and development. Camouflaged in this narrative lies an extractive, exploitative, and exclusive economy always meant to work for a few at the cost of billions, at the very cost of LIFE itself. Joanna Macy called this the Industrial Growth Society and reimagines a world moving towards a Life-Sustaining Civilization. She calls this the Great Turning.
It is madness to think that a wondrously diverse, heterogenous, and fragile planet with its billions of species and ways of living can be controlled by a single, homogenous narrative. The narrative has failed; its obsolescence is self-evident. As the rise of movements dotting the planet shows, these are the harbingers of new narratives — multiple, multifarious, gloriously pluriversal — rising from the local and contextual lives of people, crafted and envisioned by the people, and in outright denial of the current narrative of liberal capitalism imposed on them.
The world is no longer content to be ruled by a hegemonic narrative dreamed up by a handful of white men. Pockets and nodes of the new narratives are springing up in the form of movements and resistances — from #farmersprotest in India to #democracyformyanmar, from #extinctionrebellion to #blacklivesmatter. Even as authoritarianism and fascism rise across the globe, so do people’s movements to counter these repressive forces. Hitherto unheard, unacknowledged, delegitimized voices are demanding their place in the creation of the narratives of possible futures.
Paul Hawken called this the movement of movements.
I believe that we are part of a movement that is greater and deeper and broader than we ourselves know, or can know.
It flies under the radar of the media, by and large.
It is non-violent. It is grassroots.
It has no cluster bars, no armies and no helicopters.
It has no central ideology.
A male vertebrate is not in charge.
This movement is humanity’s immune response to resist and heal political disease, economic infection, and ecological corruption, caused by ideologies.
~Excerpt from Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in The World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming by Paul Hawken
However, this article is neither about climate change nor about social activism. There are plenty of authoritative and powerful work available on these topics. The first few paragraphs are meant to set the context of the current world, and to make my stance clear. This is an article about organizations — how they function in the current world, how they can become intentional communities of healing influences in these times of planetary collapse. Organizations have the power to shift their foundational narratives, and thus influence and inspire the rise of different and pluriversal civilizational narratives.
Organizations by their very nature are platforms of diverse individuals coming together around a purpose and a mission. It matters what that purpose is. It matters how that mission is articulated. Do organizations exist merely to make profit for their shareholders? Is it their overarching purpose to feed the machines of endless growth which serve no one except a few? I believe otherwise. I believe organizations have the power to bring about paradigm shifts not only within themselves but in the larger communities and societies they are a part of and serve. It is time to ask, “Who are organizations truly meant to serve?” The communities, the societies, the planet and all its sentient beings.
So enthralled are we by quarterly results, competitive advantages (whatever that mean), strategic plans and other such BAU jargon, that we have forgotten to pause and ask, “Why do the organizations exist?” “What are they offering?” “What is their impact on this planet?” When we slow down enough — an anathema in these times and all the more necessary because of the urgency — the madness gripping us becomes painfully evident. We are willing to destroy LIFE in service of profit. It defies all logic, all sensibilities.
Organizations have the facility not only to bring together individuals of diverse skills, perspectives, worldviews and mindsets around a shared purpose and vision, but also have the ability to build conscious, aware and democratic citizenry. While the latter is not an organization’s stated purpose, I believe it comes about as a beneficial consequence of an organization that runs on the principles of autonomy, wholeness, and self-management. Frederic Laloux coined the term, ‘Teal Organization’ for such workplaces and cites quite a few examples in his landmark work, Reinventing Organizations. Drawing on the work of evolutionary and social psychologists, Laloux defines a “teal” organization as one where the management is based on worker autonomy and peer relationships. ~Teal Organization
The pandemic of 2020 came as a phase shift, a point of discontinuity in an already broken world revealing the underlying fault lines and cracks with unambiguous clarity. Variously called the Great Reset, the Pause, the Great Transformation — it irreversibly changed the way we live, work, operate and relate in the world. At least, it should have. The liminal space of the crumbling and collapsing world held within it the seeds of possible futures very different from the past. What was ‘solid and locked up became open and fluid.’
In this fluidity and flux lay the space for reimagining organizational narratives, reinventing the metaphors, recreating leadership and ways of learning, being, and doing. However, in my observation, most organizations have let this opportunity slip by. The scramble to get back to ‘business as usual’ and profit from the ever-increasing disasters go to show how far removed our organizational narrative is from reality. We are living a dystopian narrative created and propagated decades ago by a handful of white European men. This hegemonic narrative founded on the principles of Hayek and Friedman led to the establishment of a single narrative based on market and profit, making economy the only driving factor behind a civilization. The blind assimilation of this narrative into every aspect of modern civilization has sought to define humans as selfish, devouring, consuming, and isolated individuals constantly seeking gratification.
By removing the need for values and ethics and emphasizing, almost fetishizing, the role of ‘free market with its invisible hand’, this narrative became devoid of any conscience. Organizations, which could have been the backbones of democracy and thoughtful citizenship, have completely failed to live up to these expectations. Caught in the traps of short-term profit, powerplay, and privileges for the few — they have aided in exacerbating the overarching collapse. Trapped by the narrative of ‘profit at all costs’, organizations became machines of production, scouring the globe for cheaper resources and ever more vulnerable and dispensable human labor.
“The governing pattern that a culture obeys is a master story — one narrative in society that takes over the others, shrinking diversity and forming a monoculture.”
Living inside a master story at a point in history, we tend to accept its definition of reality. This monoculture, over time, evolves into a nearly invisible foundation that structures and shapes our lives — touching every aspect of our lives without us being aware of it. Into this hegemonic space of a monoculture, any other story is seen as a challenge, a threat to the existing world order. The power of a monoculture lies in remaining unchallenged. ~Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything
The 17th Century monoculture revolved around science, machines, and physical laws rendering a belief that we live in a knowable and catalogue-able world. In our time, the monoculture is economic. Although arising from a handful of white men, this has permeated the globe through the deliberate process of imperialism, colonization, and neoliberalism. This single perspective has become so engrained as the only reasonable reality that we have forgotten that there are other stories, and fail to see the monoculture for what it is — a lens created by a handful of the privileged and powerful to retain those privileges and power.
The rise of the economic story has affected key areas of our lives — education, work, politics, relationship with others and the planet, our physical and spiritual health as well as our creativity. Everything now comes with a price tag and an opportunity cost. Everything is up for sale from our attention to the Amazon Forest. Anything that boosts GDP is sacrosanct, irrespective of the impact on the lives of sentient beings. It is time to unravel and see this illogical and skewed narrative for what it is — manmade (literally) and hubristic. And it is time to collectively reimagine new narratives. In the plural.
What are the new stories we are yearning for? What parts of human longing have the current story forsaken? In a pluriversal, abundant, and diverse planet, how did we end up with a single story?
As we become aware of the dangers of a single story, what stories are arising from the depth of our consciousness that can help us to weave a path to different possible futures?
Our redemption lies in our ability to reimagine alternative narratives, to question the hegemony of this monoculture and a handful of global north nations.
Technology, arising from the same consciousness of separation from nature, desire for endless economic growth, and stratification of humans merely serve to exacerbate the existing underlying malaise. A new digital Taylorism has permeated businesses in the guise of the ‘gig economy’ and ‘platform capitalism’ through the rise of ‘logged’ labor. The surveillance of workers is achieved by a variety of means including GPS, facial recognition, audio recording of customer service calls, and shopping and social media browsing history; all of these cover the minutiae of labor processes in extraordinary detail. Since gig economy also works on an extreme form of job standardization, it automatically creates a high-rate of interchangeability and mechanization.
The gig economy holds serious challenges in upholding labor rights. Gig workers are not covered under standard employee contracts. The commoditization of work means gig workers are vulnerable to fluctuation in demand. The absence of social security makes things worse for the gig workers. Those who consider gigs as their full-time job are not even employees of the company, so they do not receive any other benefits provided to employees, like health insurance, paid time off, family leave protection, etc.
At this point, everything feels fluid, rapidly shifting and evolving. Traditionalists are desperately clinging to the old. Those benefitting from the status quo are actively seeking to stop and suppress the flow of emergence and transformation that is sweeping across the planet. Even as we face planetary collapse and simultaneous systems failure, there are those grasping for the ‘old normal’, trying to normalize a failed world, trying to extract the last vestige of profit from a dying planet.
But my belief is that the planet will resurrect itself. It is human civilization that needs to reimagine the stories we live by. An inequitable world based on extraction, exploitation, and expropriation cannot sustain itself. It is mere common sense to work towards a world that works for all or else we implode. It is the only way out. In the face of inevitable collapse, idealism and imagination provide glimpses of possible futures different from the past. However, sculpting and shaping civilizational narratives to live by are tasks of communities, of societies, of holding multigenerational visions. And organizations, I believe, have a crucial role to play here in scripting and living new narratives.
By their very nature, organizations are collectives of individuals cohering around a shared purpose. At least, that is how most organizations start. Then, trapped by the metaphor of the machines, organizations lose their way. They forget that they are living, thriving, resilient communities with the power to shape their localities, communities, societies, nations. They are caught in the illusion of limitless profit and quarterly numbers forgetting that the resources of the planet are not to be had without paying due price.
Freed from the machine metaphor and reimagining themselves through the lens of living systems, organizations have the power to become platforms for communities cohering around a shared purpose, weaving narratives that are rooted in the creation of life-sustaining societies, and designing products and services that refuse to view humans as mere consumers. Organizations, when they fulfil a worthy and true purpose, draw around them passionate and committed individuals fulfilling their potential even as they collaborate and co-create. Such organizations are able to see through the illusion of the current narrative and are capable of constructing their own meaningful ones avoiding the dangers of a single story. They gradually make paradigm shifts one step at a time. If this is idealistic, so be it.
When we defend idealism, we defend imagination. We defend possibility. We defend the world of ideas. ~Peter Block
