The Big Lie of 20th century Business & The Invisible Counterpoint.
And why it now leads to the need for a new (but strangely old) form of intelligence (Hint: NOT AI)
Relationships are central to our being. The relationships themselves and the conversations they spark are what life is all about. The intelligence they liberate is potentially gold dust. From formal occasions to informal catch-ups to chance encounters. Or just being there. In the home or in the workplace, the sports club, the pub or coffee shop or, maybe, the church. From studious engagement to happy relaxation or, even, outright confrontation. These are all parts of life. And they are all important because the information they generate, when properly sourced and handled, can truly improve overall performance, goodwill and wellbeing in any situation.
And that’s vital because the space each of us occupies in this vast universe is infinitesimally small. And yet each of us is the centre of a personal universe that is the biggest, most important thing we know.
This dichotomy and the paradox it creates operates in every facet of our lives. We experience the effects of it on a moment-by-moment basis. The things we do. The places we go. The people with whom we interact. And, comparing the 20th and the 21st centuries, the analog and the digital world, there is a huge difference to it all in terms of the actions and communications that take place.
Some contacts and actions that were commonplace in the analog world simply do not happen in the digital world. And, in the digital world, we have been gifted new connection possibilities that, often, we misuse - I suspect partly because we haven’t yet fathomed how to get the best out of them.
The shift occurred over a period of several decades. By the mid-1990s, some negative effects were sufficiently in evidence for American historian and social critic Christopher Lasch (my regular readers may have realized that this guy, even post-mortem, is one of my favourite mentors) to be able to comment on it, referencing journalist Jim Sleeper:
The glory of New York, according to Jim Sleeper, lies in its “integration of proletarian strength with professional excellence and high cultural achievement” - precisely the integration that is breaking down, as we have seen, in city after city and will break down in New York as well, if current trends continue unabated."1
Well, that was in the mid-1990s and not only did the trends continue unabated, they accelerated, right across the western world. It marked the demise of a milieu characterized by a mix of types and levels of society - a Diversity, no less!
A key point to understand, for the optimum success of any organized human endeavor (and that includes all the business enterprises that have ever existed), is the interplay of the macro and the micro forces: everything that happens involves these components and unless the micro constituents in any situation are enabled and responded to appropriately, the macro forces will function sub-optimally.
The Big Lie of 20th century Business
A Big Lie underpinned western Business practices throughout the 20th century. It was the idea that business organizations always deploy rational thinking and logical processes to enable value creation in a predictable manner to deliver against precise objectives. Rational thinking … Logical processes … Precise objectives … Predictable value creation: “We’ve set the right priorities, folks! Everything’s under control! Progress will happen as decreed.” There’s only one thing wrong with all this - it’s rubbish.
The idea was - still is - that everything in a business enterprise starts with aspirations set by the top team. These aspirations are supposedly always rationally determined and then presented as results the business must achieve. The business organization is then fine-tuned and management tools put in place to optimize the chances of the aimed-for successful outcome. As a consequence, if many business gurus are to be believed, the organization succeeds and, in the process, is motivated to achieve yet more in the future.
BUT … it isn’t valid, nor was it ever valid. A business enterprise is not made up of discrete, rational blocks. Its more like a molecular soup, all the molecules zapping around in different directions with different motivations. This means that the nature of change is Complex and, simultaneously, involves Non-local (macro) and Local/Personal (micro) issues.
Self-evidently, therefore, assurance of goal attainment requires harmonization of the motivation, flow, and energy of the people (‘the molecules’) who constitute the enterprise - a harmonization of the macro and the micro perspectives.
Put it another way, the top-down-driven ‘Control’ mechanism needs to be balanced by a bottom-up-driven ‘Involvement’ mechanism, to encompass as many of the organization’s people as possible. In this regard, forget job titles, forget skills, forget status - everybody’s opinion and everybody’s input is valuable and, in this context, of high worth.
The Invisible Counterpoint
How, you may ask, could 20th century Business not understand the Big Lie and its consequences? Quite simply, it didn’t need to because a second, autonomous, system was in operation that compensated for many of the glitches arising from The Big Lie system.
Let’s call it the Invisible Counterpoint. It was ever-present. A bit like the autonomous physical capabilities that we all possess. For example, under normal circumstances we assume that our nervous systems will operate on autopilot, informing the conscious mind when appropriate … as, for example, when you stub your toe.
So, what was the equivalent to the nervous system that enabled people to participate in mass bottom-up communication, on an individual basis, in a top-down-driven analog world? It was ‘Society’. For a business, that meant the society of one’s specific organization, its employees, suppliers and, more broadly, customers and members of the communities that all of these people inhabited.
Aha! Yes, this is where all the stakeholders come in to the picture, but in a way that is different from and predates the new E.S.G. gospel. Yes, we had a form of stakeholder capitalism all along: it’s just that we have smashed one form of Diversity and Inclusion and a new elite is attempting to replace it with another that is far more artificial and divisive.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. This thing we call Society … what is it?
Society
Society exists/operates at all levels. A family is a microcosmic society. As is, a neighborhood, a village, a town, a city, a region, a country and on and on. A business enterprise is also a microcosmic society.
As for a specific definition, here’s how Ludwig von Mises put it:
Society is concerted action, cooperation. Society is the outcome of conscious and purposeful behavior.2
But, again using Mises’ analysis, it all starts from the point of view of individuals:
Nobody ever perceived a nation without perceiving its members. In this sense one may say that a social collective comes into being through the action of individuals. That does not mean that the individual is temporally antecedent. It merely means that definite actions of individuals constitute the collective.
In other words, it’s the micro and the macro working in harmony.
massRelating
So, can we reconnect the macro and the micro worlds that were severed by ‘the digital realignment’? Is it even possible? If so, can we get them to actually work in harmony?
Well, yes, we can. And, as what is in my opinion a splendid example of poetic justice, it is digital technology that makes it possible - well, digital technology and the remarkable mind of Dr Olaf Hermans.
In 2018, Olaf Hermans wrote a dissertation with the precise, if a tad wordy, title: Exploring the Role of Grounded Relationship Quality and Loyal Customer Contribution in the Satisfaction-Loyalty Chain in Ongoing Service Relationships.3
Since then, Dr Hermans has been able to test his thesis in real-world situations, including with a European national bank and a large hospital and medical care group. It works.
The current, refined thinking, processes and technology are now known as ‘R’, which is shorthand for massRelating. ‘R’ is the means to move people (employees or any other group, in fact) forward, en masse, by re-connecting the micro and the macro.
I’m proud to say that I have been able to follow, debate and even contribute a little to the developments with Dr Hermans and I hope to bring him to meet you, so to speak, on this platform in the near future. Watch this space for more news about this.
Conclusion
In the final decades of the 20th century the long-standing model of social order was torn apart. Different strata of society which, up until that point, had numerous formal and informal ways to interact were forced apart. It happened across all areas of human life.
Prior to their separation, these strata complemented one another. Informal connections helped provide a fuller picture of what was going on, enabling both encouragement and criticism across the social divides, individually and en masse, and, where appropriate, raising awareness of difficulties in execution and making adjustments.
The loss of these connections has resulted in the loss of unquantifiable amounts of information and unfathomable amounts of cohesion that once reinforced internal and external relationships, enriched business processes, stimulated engagement, produced usable (and money-saving or -making) inputs and, frankly, made life more pleasant and fulfilling.
‘R’ is the digital age methodology that reinstates the vital micro-macro connections. It is, in fact, superior to the old, informal system because it enables everyone to be reached and heard, not just those who shout loudest.
More on this topic is coming soon, including an introduction to Dr Olaf Hermans.
Thanks for reading.
Lasch, Christopher. The Revolt of the Elites: and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995) The reference is to …. Sleeper, Jim. The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and The Politics of Race in New York (1990)
Mises, Ludvig von. Human Action: a treatise on economics, Vol. 1 (1949)
Hermans, Olaf. Exploring the Role of Grounded Relationship Quality and Loyal Customer Contribution in the Satisfaction-Loyalty Chain in Ongoing Service Relationships. The Pennsylvania State University (2018)