PURPOSE AND PRINCIPLES

WIE: How can a group of people learn to think in a different way on a collective level?

DH: Well, you really have to go deep. I spent months and months asking myself, "What is an organization?" If I'm talking about institutional and organizational change, what am I really talking about? What is an organization in the deepest sense? It surely isn't just a set of bylaws, because I can write a set of bylaws and shove it in a desk drawer, and it just becomes an old moldering piece of paper. And if you really think deeply about it, you discover that every organization and every institution, without exception, has no reality save in your mind. It's not its buildings. Those are manifestations of it. It's not its name, it's not its logo, and it's not some fictional piece of paper called a stock certificate. It's not money. It is a mental concept around which people and resources gather in pursuit of common purpose.

Now let's follow this just a little further. If that institution has no reality save in your mind and the minds of all your associates and the people who deal with it, then what is its real nature? What's its real strength? And that led me to believe that the heart and soul of every organization, at least every healthy organization, is purpose and principles. What is the purpose that brought you together and what is your system of beliefs about how you intend to conduct yourself in pursuit of that purpose? If your beliefs are based on the old model of top-down command and control, specialization, special privilege, and nothing but profit, your organization will, in time, turn toxic. It will become antithetical to the human spirit and destructive of the biosphere. The evidence is everywhere around us.

Your organization needs to be absolutely clear about purpose and principles and must be very careful to know what a purpose and a principle is—you know, a purpose is not an objective, it's not a mission statement—a purpose is an unambiguous expression of that which people jointly wish to become. And a principle is not a platitude—it is a fundamental belief about how you intend to conduct yourself in pursuit of that purpose. You have to get very precise about these things. If the purpose and principles are constructive and healthy, then your organization will take a very different form than anything that you ever imagined. It will release the human spirit and will be constructive of the biosphere. Natural capital and human capital will be released in abundance and monetary capital will become relatively unimportant. To put it another way, I believe that purpose and principle, clearly understood and articulated, and commonly shared, are the genetic code of any healthy organization. To the degree that you hold purpose and principles in common among you, you can dispense with command and control. People will know how to behave in accordance with them, and they'll do it in thousands of unimaginable, creative ways. The organization will become a vital, living set of beliefs.

I've found that it's very difficult to lead people through enough metaphors and enough thinking about this—you can only think about it so much and your circuit breakers just go out. You have to rest, reset them, and come back to it. And you go over and over it. But what I find is that once you get a group of people who really begin to understand this, then energy, excitement, and enthusiasm literally explode out of them—they know what to do. You know, it's just in their nature. You can't stop it.

So to go back to the question of change—you can see that because of these four hundred years of intense conditioning, we've been taught to fear change. If you're in a rigid, mechanistic, cause-and-effect society and/or organization, then any change becomes a crisis in self-esteem. It destroys our identity, our sense of being, our sense of time and place. And we're never sure we're going to be of any value in the new order of things. We falsely see this as terrifying. But my God, this might be the greatest, most exciting adventure for the species that ever occurred.

WIE: You're pointing to a strong relationship between an individual's willingness to change and the emergence of new organizational forms.

DH: Once you understand that you and your organization are inseparable (since every organization exists only in your mind), then the idea that it's about individual change or it's about organizational change, and that one can proceed independently of the other, is utter nonsense. It takes both. I was working with one group—and this always happens in one way or another when people truly begin to understand chaordic concepts—one woman stopped the meeting to say, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. I thought we were here to work on changing our organizational structure. This is about changing me. I'll have to change my consciousness, my spirit, my way of thinking, in order to function in this new organizational form." She said, "I'll probably have to withdraw. I don't think I'll be capable of making that kind of personal change."

Individual and organizational change go hand in hand. It takes openness and a strong will to make such a change. And this comes back to why I started doing this work and what it takes to create an organization that's more harmonious with nature, and based on, the same concepts around which nature organizes every living thing and, in fact, organizes the inanimate functioning of the universe as well. When you start thinking this way, the distinction between animate and inanimate begins to vanish, and you can't be sure that the universe is not a form of life, a different manifestation of a living organism.


ETERNAL BECOMING

WIE: So for individuals to really go somewhere with this work requires that they embrace the evolutionary dynamics of the universe in a very personal way. This sounds like a thrilling prospect that, by its nature, provokes constant transformation.

DH: I wrote in my book about one of my deepest beliefs, which is that life is not about doing, it's not even about being. Life is eternal becoming, or it's nothing. It can't exist without eternal becoming. Fundamentally, the whole story of evolution is a story of experimentation and change, is it not? So if you think you can freeze that, if you think you can create a controlled environment, you are living a life of total illusion. And you are going to be full of angst and conflict, because you are essentially trying to live contrary not only to nature and evolution but to your own nature. So change is not a strange thing. It's the very essence of life.

But the bigger question people always ask is, "But, gee, so if I'm embedded in these huge command-control organizations—in the school it's the same, and my church is much the same, even the city operates this way—what can I do? Where do I begin?" And my answer is very obvious. I say, "Right now, right where you are, with what you've got—and don't hesitate for a moment." If you start pursuing these concepts, you're going to find dozens and dozens of people within your own organization and in other organizations who support these concepts. And if you don't get the support and understanding from your own organization, then cross the boundaries and link with people in other organizations who are moving this way.

WIE: You're describing quite a high level of individual commitment, the kind that has the power to create sweeping change.

DH: At one time I got interested in trying to understand how great leaders created enormous social change—take Christ, take Muhammad, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Joan of Arc, Martin Luther King, Jr. When you look back at their history, almost without exception they were nobodies. Nobody! Gandhi was just a mediocre attorney who got thrown off a train into the dust by the British because he was Indian. Mother Teresa—just an ordinary nun. And so I studied—what made their ideas so compelling? Their ideas weren't that unique. In fact, they were often pretty traditional. Why, then, did their articulation of their beliefs have such profound effect? What I discovered was something that I think is almost universally true. They really examined what was happening around them, and examined all the existing institutions, and saw with clearer vision. They didn't delude themselves about it. Furthermore, they had the capacity to project themselves into the future and deal with the four aspects that I think are essential to understanding anything: how things were (history), how they are today, how they might become or where they're heading, and how they ought to be. They had the capacity to take that larger question of "how things ought to be" into the future and decide how they ought to be.

Now, the interesting thing is that almost without exception, they didn't start by preaching it. They started by living as though it were already true. They profoundly changed their way of living and said, "I don't have to live the way I am now." Mother Teresa said, "I can pick up a beggar in the street and tell him God loves him and help him die with respect and dignity. That I can do." Right? So once they began to live as though what ought to be was true, they had an authenticity that was just compelling. Complexity theory would call it a strange attractor, a legitimacy, an authenticity. And then they talked about it. They never wavered, no matter what the obstacle, or what the condemnation. And many of them died because they couldn't live any other way. Some of them were killed. I don't think they were unique. I think that capacity is in every single living human being. We just have to get in touch with it. And begin.

WIE: Your work calls on people to stretch and grow tremendously, in part because you're evoking something at a collective level. By definition, what a group can accomplish is beyond what any one individual can imagine or encompass. This seems to be calling for a release of something in our nature over which we fundamentally have no control.

DH: What gets released, and what is arising, is what complexity theory would call an emergent phenomenon. Something starts to emerge in multiple thousands of places and nobody can figure out what caused it to happen. The kind of consciousness I've been describing is an emergent phenomenon. These kinds of organizations are going to happen. There is no alternative. The question becomes: Are they going to happen by the old Newtonian model of collapse, destruction, and reconstruction—tear the building down, build another one—or will they move in a totally different direction? For example, there are architects who say a building should be a living thing that evolves in total harmony with nature. And they're doing it. This way of thinking is emerging almost everywhere in surprising places. But it's not yet emerging as fast as the change in societal complexity and diversity that I described. It may catch up, but it's not there yet.


ON THE KNIFE'S EDGE

WIE: Where would you say we are on a global scale? Are we poised to move in a different direction?

DH: I think we're on the knife's edge where we're going to undergo cataclysmic institutional failure. We have it all over the world. Look at some of the countries that are in a state of perpetual starvation and revolution; there's just no present institutional structure capable of dealing with societal complexity and diversity with anything other than more centralization of power and increasing violence and force. So we'll have one of two possible scenarios. The first would be that we'll have a massive series of institutional failures, social anarchy, and enormous societal and biological carnage—far more than we now experience—and then maybe out of that will emerge these new concepts. But I think if we do experience massive institutional failure, the first thing that will emerge, before we see the new forms, is almost total centralization of power and control, which will result in a widespread loss of liberty and freedom. That will last for a while, but it ultimately will not work, much like the Soviet Union. And when that collapses, then we're in for a second period of social carnage that will be unbelievable.

WIE: So you're talking about a double cataclysm?

DH: Yes. And out of that, right from the ashes, may emerge the new forms of organization.

WIE: What's the second scenario?

DH: The second scenario is that enough momentum can be put behind more chaordic ideas of organization, and there can be enough interconnection and enough actual examples of these organizations built so that as the old institutions are failing, the energy of the people goes into the emerging new forms. Existing organizations can even come to realize that transformation is essential for their health and continued existence. You would then see people's energies and resources move away from destructive behavior toward constructive behavior. If that happens, it's going to be the emergence and rebirth of a community in harmony with the human spirit and biosphere, such as we've always dreamed of.

Because of the collapse of change float, either one of these scenarios can happen in a fraction of the time we would ever expect. As I said before, we can change and allow the natural order of things to emerge—it's right there, right now, waiting to happen—

WIE: —if we choose to go along with the natural order of things.

DH: Yes, but we don't have to go along. I also believe in free will. Within us as a species for the first time is the capacity to say, "Yes, I want to go along. I want to affirm this, to consciously choose it." It's an affirmation of where we came from, what we are, and it is totally compatible with every living thing, with the living Earth, and with the universe. We have the possibility of a regeneration of these natural characteristics that will bring us totally in harmony with the human spirit and the biosphere. I see it as the greatest opportunity that I can imagine in history.

WIE: And it seems that through your work you're attempting to create the very conditions whereby this regeneration can occur now.

DH: You said the magic words. You cannot cause such things to happen. You can only create the conditions by which they can emerge and realize that they're already there. Everything I described already exists in the universe, in the Earth, in every individual, in every collective of individuals. It's just waiting to be evoked. So you create the conditions and you try to evoke it, and that's the most you can hope to do.

WIE: Perhaps that's what real transformation is.

DH: Yes. It's an evolutionary approach. And if our societal institutions and our consciousness are contrary to the fundamental organizing principles of evolution and nature, we're on a collision course. They represent the ultimate in arrogance and ego. What we need is a huge dose of humility. By the way, all those great leaders I mentioned were invariably quite humble people. But that humility did not prevent them from being very pragmatic and practical about getting things done. I'm fond of saying that we don't have any idea what the Earth could produce if we came into harmony with it.

WIE: Maybe by its very nature it's impossible to imagine.

DH: Well, is it so far-fetched to believe that somehow something wonderful and incredible beyond our present imagining could occur? I don't think so. I think that's what's been going on in evolution since the beginning of time. So let's give it a chance.