I’m convinced, though, that harmony is achievable. And I’m going to prove it – and help your organisation get there. By the end of this book, I hope you’ll never think about organisational culture the same way again. I also want to assist anyone seeking to improve the culture inside any organised human endeavour: whether that’s a relationship with a partner, family, social group or within your community.
It’s my belief that flawed organisational culture fucks up the world.
And who is it that is responsible for culture? Yep. Us. The people inside it.
So we’ve got to sort it out. And with your help, I reckon it’s possible.
Introduction: We Can’t Go on Like This
I don’t agree. These three simple words are the cause of so much trouble. Confound the wordsmith who first strung them together. Try saying them, form your lips around the words. Whisper them. No matter how softly spoken, the phrase is a bomb thrown into any conversation.
Collectively, we are rubbish at agreeing stuff.
We cannot agree on which values to cherish and which to abhor; on whether an ideology should be defended with our lives or violently imposed on others. We cannot agree which religion is right or wrong. We cannot come to any middle ground between creation and evolution, or whose version of the truth is a lie. Don’t even talk about socialism and if it’s fairer than capitalism, or if life is cruel or just. We cannot agree if global warming exists or not, or whose vested interests to protect or reject: amazingly, when it comes to the climate debate, there is science that proves both sides of the argument. Global warming does exist and it doesn’t. We can’t even agree on which is better: red or white wine, rugby or football.
Worse than all of the above, even when we agree that something needs to be done, we can’t agree on the best way to get it done. I can bring this point vividly to life and save at least 1,000 words by using just one: Brexit.
It would seem, then, that we are not genetically predisposed to agree on anything at all.
Humanity has driven a long way up the evolutionary trail, but if you consider the perspective from the rear-view mirror, there are a lot of dead bodies back there – a significant portion of which didn’t die of old age. Throughout the history of our species, groups of people with one world view have used violence as a way of getting other groups of people with different opinions to come around to their way of thinking. This is an approach that never converts anyone – not only is it morally bankrupt, it’s terribly inefficient; the oppressed are merely driven underground to become a seething reservoir of righteous rage, ripe to boil over in further bloodshed at some later stage.
We can’t go on like this.
Current United Nations (UN) projections put the world’s population at around 10bn people by the year 2050. This will have an obvious knock-on effect of scarcity of resources – creating super-heated competition for meagre parcels of food, land and energy. To add further filling to a shit sandwich of Scooby Doo proportions: the wealth gap grows ever wider, accelerated climate change threatens the poorest the most, we risk being factionalised by gender, the issue of who governs America continues to polarise the largest economy in the world and there are more instances of geopolitical sabre rattling than you can shake a stick at.
Those of a pessimistic outlook might be entitled to think we’re standing at an apocalyptic brink. Potentially more worrying – there’s nobody to advise us to step back from the edge of this precipice but ourselves.
It remains to be seen whether or not the joint efforts of science and technology can counter our scarcity problems with ingenious solutions, such as growing all our food on the Moon. Regardless of whether or not the clever people in white lab coats serve up food shortage solutions on a lunar platter, world population is not going to decrease any time soon.
Which means we are all going to be getting a lot closer to our neighbours: packed-tube-train close; close enough to smell each other’s breath. With such proximity, not only will we be competing for resources, but our ideas, our beliefs, our ideologies will be much more visible as they too – amplified by globally networked media – compete for greater airtime in a confined space.
It seems everywhere you look some shouty influencer is wanging on about how your world view is wrong. Not only does this increase the possibility of conflict in society, it’s demotivating – big-picture macro factor issues, over-simplified by self-appointed citizen journalists, deliberately polarised to present someone or some group as the cause of all our woes, trickle down from social media and into the fabric of our daily lives. They leave a dark stain. Even those sporting the rosiest-tinted spectacles, casting a casual glance at all the internet has to offer, will observe a marked lack of tolerance, less willingness to embrace divergent views or to take a wider perspective.
In order to guarantee our survival as a species we are going to have to be more collaborative and nurture our relationships across gender, sexuality, belief sets and ideologies, race, community, nationality, family, business interests and all the other phenomena we come to blows over.
Given that history is usually recorded from the vantage point of military conquest – with everything else mere filler between battles – one question worth asking is how then do we achieve more harmony?
That’s what this book is about.
My own experience of destructive disharmony
I know just how bad disagreement can make things in business and in life. And no map existed to help me navigate conflict’s rugged and merciless terrain when I most needed it.
I had spectacularly fallen out with my fellow shareholders in a business I had run for nearly a decade as managing director. What started as minor boardroom disputes over the direction of the enterprise turned into a power struggle, culminating after 18 months in a public firework display of white-hot emotions on the office floor.
We could probably have sold front row seats on Ticketmaster.
There was no going back. The aftermath threatened the security of my young family, disrupted the highly valued team I’d put together, cost all the partners a small fortune in legal fees – and a business we’d given so much to turned to ashes in the conflagration.
Could we have done things differently?
Definitely.
Knowing how to… that’s a different matter. Of all the questions I asked myself in the period of reflection that followed, one kept coming back: did my partners have a position in the argument that was at least as valid as mine? It took me a long time to reach any kind of position on this. Only now, with the benefit of hindsight, can I confirm that yes, they probably did.
Actually, what a dick, I’ve done it again – strike the word probably from that previous sentence. Even now, after all this time, it’s hard to work against my own attribution bias and give some credit to the other side’s position.
The most important lessons from this were:
Firstly, disagreement is a powerful motivating force, capable of driving massive economic, political and social change – for good or bad. Which outcome is good and which bad is often subjective. My positive might be your negative and vice versa.
Secondly, in the wider world of global economics and geopolitics, where most of us think we have little sway, when an outcome is recognised by almost everyone as truly terrible, it’s likely that a failure to take perspective triggered a series of escalating tensions until things got really out of hand.
Thirdly, changing the world is a mammoth task, but, as with all big tasks, widescale change