WHOLE SYSTEMS CHANGE

Helen-Jane Nelson, or “HJ” as she's known, may be the Lara Croft of the business consulting world. “HJ Nelson is a prototype,” Steve Trevino tells me. “HJ is the model. She has mastered the arcane aspects of all the different cutting-edge systems, from Appreciative Inquiry to Barrett's Cultural Transformation Tools to the different levels of Spiral Dynamics Integral, and others, and she has been able to blend it into a whole.” Through these new approaches to understanding human interaction and growth, Nelson has studied the psychological, socio-emotional, behavioral, structural, systemic, and even spiritual dynamics that shape both the experience of life within organizations and their capacity to respond to our changing world. Speaking with her is an unusual experience because of the quality with which she listens and the fullness of her responses. There's a sense that there are no barriers between us. It's easy to see why she is at the vanguard of a small but growing number of practitioners who are working to release the adaptive intelligence of the living beings who are stuck within the mechanistic thinking that dominates the corporate environment.

“The very mechanical Newtonian construction of the corporation is a fragile design paradigm easily subject to disruption and breakdown,” Tom Rautenberg, a partner at Generon Consulting, remarks to me. Ever since the heyday of the Industrial Age, the corporation has needed mechanics—thus creating the boom industry of business consulting. The first organizational theory was Frederick Taylor's scientific management. Taylorism reduced human work—first on the factory floor and then in the office—to small repetitive tasks timed with a stopwatch. Adding in some leeway for rest, Taylor would calculate production levels that the workers then were required to meet. For the first time, “management” became a specialty that was separate from labor, dividing the workplace by function—and creating the need for powerful, highly paid, and vocal experts to metaphorically hold the stopwatch. Despite the increasing sophistication of management science, the function of business consultants—from large firms such as McKinsey & Co., Booz Allen Hamilton, The Boston Consulting Group, Accenture, Pricewaterhouse-Coopers, and Arthur Andersen, to legions of small firms and solo practitioners—has been primarily to tinker with production efficiencies, cost reduction, sales, and training. In other words, to help the machines ever more effectively churn out commodities and services that produce profit for shareholders.

HJ Nelson is not a mechanic. She is an agent of evolution, working with the most sophisticated understanding and methods available to “tap into what wants to emerge next” in the business as a whole. She works almost undercover, you might say, assessing what is not visible from the prevailing framework—the worldviews, motivations, and aspirations that are alive in the human beings in the corporation. “Over just the last three years,” Nelson tells me, “I've begun to notice that more individuals within organizations say that they are seeking a larger purpose—and this desire is rarely being met.” Something happens to human beings when they become cogs in the corporate machine. As Rautenberg observes, rigid corporate structures “don't nurture the human spirit, because they are not living systems—they're machines. They turn us into mechanical objects.” The mechanical object has a specific routinized function. When human beings are placed in narrowly defined positions where those above control the fate of those below, the effect is to constrain our intelligence, responsibility, and creativity—in short, to constrain our consciousness.

Ironically, given that capitalism ushered in the modern era, the human experience within the corporation harks back to medieval times. It's surprisingly feudal. I was struck by how often the business leaders and consultants with whom I spoke referred to “fiefdoms,” “towers,” and the general climate of fear, paranoia, collusion, and subservience within corporations. In high-stress organizations, says Brian Bacon, “ninety percent of the people don't say what they mean or do what they say. Which is why ninety percent of what should happen, doesn't happen.” From top to bottom in large businesses, individuals frequently feel victimized by the choices they believe they have to make in order to survive. So many of us drop our autonomy, our ethical concerns, and our responsibility for the impact of our actions on others and the world when we cross the threshold into the office. In short, our consciousness seems more evolved outside the office than in it.

However, the disparity between individuals' longing for deeper meaning and the narrow interests of the corporations in which they work holds a powerful potential for change from the inside out. Rather than tinkering with the mechanics of organizations in terms of production efficiencies, Nelson works to resolve this disparity and release creative intelligence by using principles of living systems design. In a living system, changes in the environment stimulate response and adaptation system-wide; living systems naturally evolve. Christopher Cooke, a consultant and master practitioner of Spiral Dynamics Integral, a comprehensive tool for assessing such development, speaks of the phragmites reed as an example: this lowly plant is constantly responding to the bacteria in the water in which it grows. Within three days of encountering a new bacterial strain, the reed naturally produces a perfect antibacterial agent to fight it off. In most businesses, however, the capacity for such intelligent response to the environment is frequently blocked by fear, mistrust, and competitiveness within the organization itself. “By helping to remove the barriers that constrain the innovations and new thinking from emerging within the organization,” Cooke explains, “you get access to the evolutionary impulse that naturally moves human beings forward, an experience of a natural motivational flow.” Nelson, Cooke, and others who work with these approaches use the natural human evolutionary impulse toward greater wholeness to shift the organization's culture so that it can respond with creativity and positivity to a changing global environment.

For the world to change, Nelson says, corporations “need to move from a profit-and-growth, fear-based system to a more humanitarian whole systems perspective.” The demand for change is pressing on businesses and the individuals within them. Outside these nearly feudal corporate structures, a shift in the consciousness of the mainstream is already taking place, moving beyond the creativity of the modern era to a postmodern era focused on personal fulfillment, a desire for authentic relationship, and a growing recognition of our connectedness expressed, for example, in environmentalism. This is the legacy of the sixties. Surprisingly, and not a little ironically given the anti-corporate rhetoric of the post-sixties generations, the capacities of this consciousness carry the potential for transforming the culture within the corporation. It allows the development of “mutual trust and respect,” which Ichak Adizes sees as critical to establishing a foundation within the business to “think globally and act locally.” As he explains, “When there is internal political fighting, disrespect, and mistrust, most of the energy goes into resolving internal political issues and only the surplus that is left goes to deal with the external world. The goal is not to eliminate conflict, which would stop change, but to transform conflict that is destructive into conflict that is constructive.” Key to that transformation is realizing a level of consciousness, a way of thinking, that can cope with the complexity of diverse views and multiple demands.

The problem is that the corporate world has scant interest in change that does not seem immediately related to the bottom line. Efforts to “humanize” the workplace are increasingly prevalent but are rarely more than fancy window dressing. Nelson has been looking for a company that wants to truly evolve: “We need a model,” she says emphatically, “to show that it's possible to have a company be totally sustainable and successful using the current business metrics.” We need, she tells me, to show that whole systems change is possible.

“What is 'whole systems change'?” I ask Nelson. “It has to include all four quadrants,” she says, referring to the basic template of reality that is the foundation of Ken Wilber's integral philosophy [see Whole Systems Change diagram]. Whole systems change has to take into account all dimensions of organizational life: individual and collective, cultural and structural, internal and external. Some practitioners, like Nelson, work with individuals' desire for wholeness and meaning to transform the internal dynamics of the company as well as its vision and mission. Others, like Adizes, shift the power structure within the organization to create a context of trust and respect that then facilitates a shift in individual consciousness. Regardless of the strategy, the whole systems approach aims to systematically shift the entire organization to a higher order of consciousness—one that is in alignment with individuals' aspirations for deeper meaning and real relationship.

This is what we could call intraorganizational change, and even this is just the first level of change needed to rouse the company to life. Releasing the human spirit within the corporation makes it possible for “conscience and consciousness to start to develop in the larger networks or systems of which every organization is a part,” Peter Senge observes. “Because while these corporations are huge entities with hundreds of thousands of employees and operations around the world, they still sit in larger systems. And it's those larger business, educational, and political systems that actually have to transform if our way of living together is to be in harmony with the living systems upon which we all depend.” What Senge is speaking about is the power of interorganizational change. If we think about the company as an organism, then we ask, What kind of relationships does it have? What values does it express? And this takes us far beyond a narrow concern only for the growth and sustainability of an individual organization to question whether or not that organization is responsible in the relationships in which it is embedded. In other words, to ask, Is the behavior of the corporation sustainable in terms of its global effects on human beings and the biosphere as a whole?

It is interorganizational transformation that has the potential to bring to life Michael Braungart's vision of a new capitalist creativity. At this level, the interconnectedness of the corporation with the whole planet and its people demands a different motivation than profit-making. A new kind of self-interest, “a self-interest that emerges from wholeness to the parts rather than from the parts to the whole,” as Rautenberg says, has to emerge as the guiding force for the corporation. Yet such an integral, holistic self-interest demands a transformation of consciousness that takes us far beyond the sixties ethos of personal fulfillment. As corporations increasingly realize that their survival is dependent upon relationships that they cannot control—tribal conflict in a country where they are manufacturing, a shift in the Gulf Stream that changes fish habitats, a stock market that's beginning to be responsive to larger humanitarian concerns—the rigid walls of the machine begin to look like an optical illusion. Everything is interdependent. And creating from this living interdependence takes us beyond what we know how to do. How do you run a company in this context? Answering this question was once “the classic domain of general management consulting,” Rautenberg notes. “But in this new context, it is the point of the greatest struggle and lack of clarity.”

To date, general business theories and practices—even those concerned with corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability—do not address much beyond the organizational level, which is clearly inadequate to the interrelated global problems that we face. Imagine having a health care plan that only took into account the health of your hand, or a finger on your hand, rather than the entire body. That's an analogy that Frank Dixon, managing director of Innovest, an investment advising firm that rates corporate sustainability, often likes to make to illustrate the need for a whole systems strategy, one that reaches to encompass the well-being of the entire global economic system. Without a way of thinking that starts at that level, and sees each corporation as part of a larger whole, we will never reach the goal of an environmentally and economically sustainable world. If organizational strategy is developed separate from an overall systems strategy, it will not be aligned with the whole system.

“It's never been done before,” says Nelson. “This is the very edge of what we know. And the time has come to show that it can work—because corporations are the most influential institutions on the planet. They have to, and can, lead the way.” Whole systems change depends on two shifts of consciousness. One shift, which makes intraorganizational change possible, frees the individuals within organizations from the feudal mentality that the rigid hierarchies of the machine hold in place. The other shift, which is essential for interorganizational change, must create a new hierarchy and a new leadership to transform the systems that govern global enterprise. This latter shift needs leaders who are grounded in a global perspective that recognizes our interdependence and the constant demand to transform in order to meet our ever-changing world.

But how does consciousness change occur? For some, it takes a stark encounter with the reality that our mechanistic mind has created. For practitioners such as Nelson, it takes bringing into the corporate world the knowledge from spiritual traditions and the human potential movement about higher states of consciousness. These pioneers are developing innovative ways of transforming consciousness within the corporation to create both intra- and interorganizational change. They are all working to change the whole system.

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