Forget pivoting — it’s time to transform the basis of our systems. The solution is human.
If you have been following the social and professional “rules” in your life — as you were well-trained since childhood to do — you will already know the following disturbing and major truth: those rules don’t work well, except for the select few who may win the financial battles but lose the personal fulfillment war.
As for the rest of us, we end up serving the select few. And since the whole system is based on a mechanistic and top-down control practice (which in itself was created out of major respect for the Prussian army’s 1850’s organizationally-borne war wins against two neighboring European countries) — and which is unserviceable in a COVID-era world, the entire system as it is, is basically looking rather…well, I’ll be polite about it…done.
The transforming of our world and our place in it is going so fast, we have run right past the realization of the toxicity of the system — and the “whys” of that fact (yes, “fact”, not “claim”; you can take a look at employee engagement and attrition numbers to reassure yourself that these problems do not hinge on finding the specifically worst employees the market has to offer, but on something else) — and we are now deeply into the need to transform, but we don’t entirely understand why.
A romantic yearning for the “good old days” of predictable order in life and of knowing one’s place in it, not to mention— most urgently — a desire to be taken care of financially, is still alive and kicking. The further into uncertainty we are led by COVID, environmental worries, business change, negative reactions to the democratization of the faces of our government, and the urgent need to bring feminine elements of personhood and interaction to the fore and stepping into those power-filled elements, the louder the “traditional” voice screams.
Instead of dismissively deeming the feminine qualities of cooperation, compassion, process, multi-facetedness, relationship-building and emotional flexibility, we could build upon them. Or we can continue to be dedicated to how many billions we can salt away into paranoid underground “silos” to survive the horrors birthed by an unbalanced so-called “masculinity”.
No question: We all want security. We all want to do what we want to do. Some want security. Some, like me, want exploration of their own lives.
But in America, for one, we have been bifurcated; not 50/50 in terms of differences of opinion on an agreed-on topic, but separated on two completely different human levels.
Right now, some simply want to get whatever they want, and damn the torpedoes and damn the planet and damn you too, because looking at the bigger problems is simply too frightening and too enormous, and their drive for personal security too great to allow for clear vision. Panic will do that to you.
Others prefer to look ahead with courage and honesty, thinking it is a grand idea to figure out how to change ALL of us so that not only might a lot more people experience living without suffering, but that additionally as a pleasant little side benefit the entire planet might exist past the lives of our children.
It doesn’t seem difficult to see which is the better option.
While the politicians talk about how to handle a post-Trumpian country — and a lot of those politicians (thank God!) are already working on it, and never actually stopped! — the schism remains. And the schism is not a “political” one. It is a schism of consciousness: inclusivity vs. self-righteousness! Me vs. us! Mine vs. ours! Citizen Kane vs. Star Trek!
That consciousness is what we need to change in order to bring forth the already existing understanding, realization, and urgency that calls to us as a human group.
Now is when, metaphorically speaking, your pregnant wife sits up in bed and says softly, “It’s time”, with a kind of quiet urgency that has you reaching for your clothes before you can even process the meaning of her words.
That is a “come to Jesus moment”. Each individual has to have their come-to-Jesus moment, now. No waiting. No line. No kidding.
You think everything that is happening in the world is separate from you and that you can avoid the bad parts? Wrong.
You think that you can have the kind of security you want, separate and apart from others, and whistle as you walk away? A lovely Hollywood ending for your personal story? Absolutely fuggin WRONG!
The ship we are all on has holes in its boards, and if you are up in the sails mocking the people who are trying to keep the water from getting too high as it gushes in, more fool you.
When the ship sinks, even the sails end up under water.
As a community, as a world, as human beings, it is time for transformation.
When I saw the toxicity, the dysfunction of the systems we live in, I wrote a book called The Human Solution [to be published this year] designed to awaken business leaders to the practical reasons that our systems have become impractical: after 32 years in corporate work — the last two in a company that absolutely personified systemic toxicity and the utterly destructive mechanization of human beings — I saw the system for what it is: utterly lacking in seaworthiness for the human journey to come if, that is, we don’t do some transforming right about now.
COVID has leveled the playing field. Every single country in this world is interconnected, and is struggling, and having trouble coming together at a lot of levels.
The solutions I have found lie in things like connectedness, communication and having the ovarios to open our eyes, get out of “bed”, and get moving on some new answers! Interconnected, organic social answers, complete changes of business structures, practices and behaviors.
Why? Because the ship is creaking and breaking. We are in the movie Jaws, you might say, and it is the last scene when the shark comes back and WHAM! here comes the water! We have to stop singing “Show me the way to go home” now. Plus it would behoove us to realize that “home” does not mean that we get to go back either to the 1950’s or even to 2019! At this point we should see ourselves as rather more a part of the Moana story, where we need to “wayfind” our asses off, together. We have to see where we have been so that we can see where we are going! And then we have to start going!
The visionaries and the tactical peeps need to join up and understand that like it or not, we now have to get better at understanding one another, at giving up our selfishness as we agree on the nature of the goals that are enormous in scope.
If you thought that spirituality was a topic that could happily be excluded from business, you are in for an interesting awakening. Because practical spirituality is the word of the day as we walk into this new way of being.
In the work I do around authenticity, communication and transforming of business relationships with self and others, it is practical spiritual aspects that lead the way. This has been sneaking up on all of us as the new answers are seen by more and more professionals as answers based on qualities of life and human complexity, beauty and possibility, rather than the mechanistic plug-and-play types of answers that give us the dubious benefit of feeling as though we are in total control, even though we are not.
Emotional savvy— a very human-based skill — sort of crept into corporations in these last years, much to their dismay. In the 1850’s, when Scrooge’s Mr. Fezziwig model of the business owner died with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, there arose an uncertain addressing of the needs of people in our businesses, but this has become ever more reluctant and uncreative in the 2000's. Employee “rewards” groaned their way to the surface, a proving of corporate interpersonal intimacy by way of special events or gifts for employees who tend to see the motivation by the company as insincere: as not-enough, or as a payoff for less money and bad benefits, or as a way of keeping resignations at bay. The employees are therefore neither moved by the company’s perceived money-motivated and impersonal expressions of care, nor are they motivated by them.
The impersonality is killing all of us. Even those at the top.
If you need proof, think how many alcoholics, drug addicts and depressives you have seen; how much absenteeism, and turnover, and general misery you have seen, and experienced, in the workplace.
It doesn’t have to be this way. It literally cannot continue to be this way.
How difficult it is to give up our comforts, our expectations, our security, and set out for an unknown shore! I know this to be true, because my story includes a time in my mid-50’s where I lost absolutely everything. Money, health, partner, home, certainty, future. Everything.
So I understand intimately the pain of letting go. But there are those who have set sail for the unknown, and arrived at places of incredible transformation. (Steve Jobs comes immediately to mind, though his superpower was not in the interpersonal but in the impersonal visionary.)
We still have a choice: to start looking with clear and courageous eyes at what-is, and to make choices that are not settled only on instant security, but long-term and communal security for the entire human community, through its seeming opposites: authenticity, vulnerability, mutual understanding, and the like.
There are tools and teachings that help us break through our trained separative behaviors which I use in business — in teams, in leadership groups, in groups of businesswomen leaders — to soften the way to this transformation. This softening is necessary, and kind of sneaky. Businesses want to solve problems with teams, with employee engagement and the like. Fantastic! That is where I focus, and that is the language that I and they understand! And sneakily, in bringing tools and practices and options of creative interaction and understanding to the fore, I get to introduce to those people the high and success-producing hidden problems and transform-it experiences they never expected to see in a company.
Easing our way in to transformation is far preferable to waiting for the life-threatening emergency that necessitates life jackets amid hard-to-manage feelings of panic and despair.
Far better to choose to look at what-is with clear, courageous eyes of increasing discernment, and try something that hasn’t been tried countless times before.
We increase our possibilities, too, when we cease looking at those below the power line as somehow being the “infants” of our businesses who need to be controlled, and instead break the barriers that stop the flow of the vast amount of creativity, experience and information that sits, untapped, in every single corporation. I worked with a man in a call center once who was studying for his Ph.D. in Human Resources. No one knew, because no one asked to know who we were. The assumption was (and remains in nearly all corporations) that we are born, fully hatched, at our cubicles, our pasts erased or insignificant, and our full worth encompassed by the almighty title.
Not true. So completely not true it boggles the mind when you see that systemic hog-tying with your eyes open!
So, who is ready to embrace the human answers, the possibilities, the courageous and relief-inducing of understanding where we stand and where we would prefer to go? Or shall we stick with being righteous about how our lives and work “should” be, and beat each other with our oars while the ship slowly sinks?
Lori Kirstein is an Authenticity, Communication and Business Transformation Consultant. She is the founder of The Goodbye Good Girl Project, which eschews following the rules in favor of exploring and questioning them in order to create vibrant, deeply meaningful and transformational lives, work, and health. Lori is a partner with The Predictive Index, and can be reached at support@GoodbyeGoodGirl.com
