|
Towards Integration: Creating Sustainable Leadership in the 21st Century
by Dr. Art Wouters
A profound change is taking place in the foundations of our thinking. Tremors have come and cracks have appeared, threatening the stability of the superstructure. The impact upon the architecture of leadership is profound. The tremors are postmodern assumptions that yield little stability and unity.
Integration on a personal level requires a dynamic interaction between four foundational areas of our lives. The four areas are Calling (a transcendent sense of purpose), Career (how we make a living, both long and short-term), Community (who we know and spend time with) and Creativity (our unique contributions). These require alignment and integration if leaders are to achieve sustainable impact.
There are strong pressures for each of the "4 C’s" to move out of alignment and away from integration. Integration is relentlessly threatened by disintegration. There are many sources of disintegration. One threat to integration is the assumptions we accept as normal, from which other ideas and beliefs grow and develop. I am particularly concerned with postmodern assumptions, which I will highlight as the cracked foundations that make disintegration thrive. We need to be aware of these assumptions and repair the foundation if we are to create a superstructure of sustainable leadership in the next century.
Postmodern Thinking
Postmodernism has normalized the assumption that reality is subjective, dependent upon one’s culture and language. Language no longer represents objective reality or truth. Our thinking has been deeply affected by a mentality that encourages public neutrality on any issue of importance. In this pluralistic context there is no way to establish the truth, indeed, there is no truth to establish! The same thinking negates the importance -- and even the validity -- of critical reasoning and evaluation of diverse perspectives, principles and values. Everyone’s life is merely a story. Asserting the truth or validity of any story above another’s is considered arrogant and regarded with suspicion.
Despite the postmodernism in our foundation, we are unable to avoid making value judgments about what is or is not true. We now hold intuitive assertions and scientific descriptions in totally separate categories. This adds to our fragmentation. The decision to adopt a postmodern perspective and not another one requires comparison and an assessment that concerns truth. While the issue of judging truth is inescapable we foolishly live as if the problem has been adequately addressed.
I am sympathetic to the problems of pluralism and supportive of the need to address the arrogance associated with rationalism, yet the foundations of postmodern thinking create more problems than they solve. Its influence is especially notable on the four defining areas of our lives. This state of fragmentation goes beyond alienating us from our world to impacting our identity, sense of community, the meaning of our actions and the value of our lives.
Calling
Calling has become an old-fashioned term, and it has been replaced by an understanding of responsibility. One is primarily responsible for oneself and to oneself and there is no true higher or ultimate authority who calls or to whom one is accountable. There is no thing and no one greater than self; therefore, we are trapped by subjectivity and unable to evaluate the larger purposes for meaningful living.
This purely subjective notion of calling is associated with a faith that is self-generated and with assumptions about spirituality that sabotage the potential for sustained impact. Intuitive or spiritual experiences are pursued without regard to how we live, love, and work. Faith is a purely private affair and therefore does not have to be communicated or lived out. While this provides the devotee with personal satisfaction and inner personal tranquility, it leads to fragmentation of beliefs and action.
This kind of solipsistic, un-integrated spirituality is popular because we don’t want religion to get mixed up and interfere with our other pursuits, nor with our role in society. Faith need not stimulate and generate sustainable action because of its location in a "private piece of space." The problem is that the more private it is, the greater the potential for it to move towards disintegration of the person and their world, leaving only meaninglessness in its wake.
Community
Without a Calling to someone or something objectively greater than ourselves, we are left merely with responsibility to ourselves and for ourselves. Without genuine responsibility to and for others we are fragmented from our communities. Without this genuine sense of community, we are left with regulated, formalized socioeconomic groupings reducible to rights, contracts and policies.
In our postmodern world we struggle with deep differences which threaten to divide us. I have indicated above that the foundations of postmodern thinking enable us to push matters of spirituality and truth into a private realm of experience and thought which makes it impossible to distinguish reality from fantasy. Something is true simply because we feel it to be so. We think that unity should follow this avoidance of conflict, but in actuality the effect is to alienate us further from the experience of community. We are unable to connect with people who differ from us on issues that are vitally significant. Our communication with those who agree with us is often superficial and socio-centric. We become accustomed to believing that we must all be right because each party feels they are right. In this subjective vacuum we cannot truly take one another seriously and engage one another honestly with intellectual humility on serious issues regarding our beliefs and values. The hearty give and take of provocative debate and dialogue that marks healthy community life is forfeited in favor of rehashing ideological opinions.
This subjectivism leads to a loss of identity that deeply impacts Community. Your identity is the part of yourself you experience as constant across different situations. It is your real self. Identity is central to your sense of person-hood; I am such and such a person and I am not that kind of person.
Postmodernism reduces our identity to our function in society; therefore, identity is reduced to a social construct with nothing really intrinsic to the person. There is no genuine uniqueness, and there is therefore no real identity. Our views are not really ours, and we have no way of assessing the truth or error of what we stand for. Our mind is simply one amongst many equally valid minds. The difficulty with this is that we have to keep making room within ourselves for more points of view that are totally incompatible. In our pluralistic and multicultural society all views are now equally valid! In the end it is difficult to know who we are. The loss of personal identity diminishes our sense of responsibility and social conscience. This loss of identity and community cohesion leads to increased social control by particular power elites.
Instead of having an identity based on thinking through issues and coming to rational conclusions, you are faced with multiple dissonant identities, all equally valid, based on images you are fed and with which you identify. The moment you think you are sure of yourself on an issue related to lifestyle, marriage, sexual orientation, or religion, there are scores of contrasting voices, no longer just from the outside, but increasingly from the inside. So truth claims look arbitrarily arrogant. There is no valid claim on truth. Your reasons for believing what you believe are as valid or invalid as anyone else’s. Therefore you end up not knowing why you do what you do, or at best it is irrelevant to know it. It all depends on whom you happen to be with at the moment. As a result, you lose a sense of who you are, the sense of your identity. You yield your independent "I" for an ever changing "we."
But without a sense of identity you cannot have relationships. You need to know who you are and guard what is in your heart. You need boundaries to enjoy a sense of community.
Career and Creativity
The two defining areas of Career and Creativity are closely linked to Calling and Community. Career is rendered largely meaningless by the perspective of our world as a creation of our own minds. Our world is rendered unknowable because we never know what lies behind our projections. The effect is to alienate and isolate us from the environment we are called to impact through our careers, as our world represents little more than a mirror of our culture and language. How can you impact a reality you don’t believe exists out there? How do you experience meaning with respect to your work if it takes place in a context that may not really be there? No wonder we resort to hedonism as the driving force, because pleasure is probably the most real of the unrealities.
With the general acceptance of the assumption that our form comes from our function rather than the other way around, there is no identity that is intrinsic to an individual. Therefore, Career cannot flow from a transcendent sense of purpose with gifts given to the individual to ensure that he or she is able to fulfill their vocation. Career has been segregated from the true self and instead has become the source of satisfaction of the needs of the false self. What I mean is that one’s career is expected to meet all the individual’s needs for self worth, status, achievement, master, control and value. Career has become totally absorbing because of its disconnection from the other C’s. Career, instead of expressing your calling to serve, is more likely to reflect your value to society. Individuals also choose a career based on its perceived value to society and the money that demonstrates this value in order that they may benefit from identification with the career. Needs that should be met through involvement in the community are met through Career.
On a personal level, at one stage I increasingly identified with my career and the image of myself that it fed back to me. I remember how incredibly important I felt as a result of my position on a Directorate and my contribution to its direction and the direction of our organization. While there are innumerable demands that are very consuming, there are always rewards that meet deep needs. Career has the capacity to offer me a sense of calling through the mere sense of importance in what I am doing. Career also tries to satisfy my needs for community by offering me a group of people who admire me for what I do. Career attempts to satisfy my need to express my creativity. All this attempts to substitute for integration, but it further fragments people and splits them from whom they truly are.
Creativity is also split off from Community and Call in postmodernism because of the absence of a meaningful outward focus. The thrust of Creativity is one of self expression and the motive is to have the self validated through one’s creativity, whether the true or false self. Therefore creativity easily becomes a self-absorbing initiative rather than being directed at serving others from a sense of Community and Call. Without the sense of purpose, the external focus and meaningful connection with Community, Creativity that is disconnected tends to lose its way and cause destruction not only to the self but also to others, especially when our disconnected work also saps us of our creativity.
For many the lack of connection to a transcendent purpose and the dearth of meaning in self-absorbed creativity contributes to Creativity lying dormant. For one thing, our lifestyles are so busy that we do not take the time to make new things or make things new. Most of us are better at subscribing to old patterns and the pressure to produce the tried and proven.
Disintegration and the 4 C’s
I have discussed ways in which I believe that postmodern assumptions have infiltrated the foundations of our thinking and have led us toward disintegration and meaninglessness. The defining areas of people’s lives represented by the 4 C’s are segregated from the true self and transcendent meaning, purpose, or permanence. Without integration of the 4 C’s there is not much left but the frenetic pursuit of meaning through any one or more of the defining areas of one’s life. The problem is that none of the 4 C’s is able to sustain itself independently in the long run. On its own, Calling loses its meaning as it drifts into mere subjectivity. The bright light of our Career eventually burns out if we do not burn out first. Career no longer satisfies when the realization eventually gets through that the bottom line is what you can produce rather than being who you are. What you are merely wanted for is not enough to sustain any person. Creativity needs a wider context to be sustained. It needs to see fruits that affect the lives of others in meaningful ways. Lastly, nobody can live a meaningful life without participating in genuine community and authentic relationships characterized by truth and love. We need to be able to be real or truthful as well as tolerant and accepting.
The Impact of Fresh Foundations
We need to be actively creating a climate that enables us to find a pathway out of the fragmentation perpetuated by postmodern ideas. Instead of aligning reality with ourselves, it is imperative that we align ourselves with reality. Only by so doing can we realize sustainable impact.
It should be evident from the above that movement toward integration will have a profound impact on leadership and organizations. Below are some of the practical consequences for leadership arising from a commitment to reintegration:
1. Integration allows us to expect solutions of greater permanence. Sustained impact and effectiveness is something we can wholeheartedly strive to achieve instead of expecting to have to construct something totally different and fragmented again. Solutions that reflect the truth as it is are not superficial phenomena that will only endure the next two years and need replacing. We can go beyond producing something that will make the consultants rich until they can think of something that everyone has realized is simply a reflection of the moment and needs to be replaced. There will be an increase in sustainable solutions that will become foundational to other solutions.
2. People and organizations are increasingly committing themselves to principles and values that transcend the subjectivity of individuals. These values are bigger than the individual or the organization and have validity and objectivity whether or not people believe in them. It is both possible and valid to make judgments about what is true or false, right and wrong. Integrated thinking recognizes a real world and sustainable impact requires that we adjust our lives to it rather than conveniently creating our own world. The commitment to objective values and principles of honesty, and integrity, whether pragmatic or not, will result in greater innovation and creativity.
3. There is an increased willingness to openly discuss feelings and ideas normally narrowly restricted to the spiritual arena. The spiritual facet of life has been unpopular for many decades because of the association with dogmatic assertions and the problems this causes in a pluralistic world. We certainly do not need to go back there. We have no need, however, to sustain artificial dichotomies and fragmented thinking. It leads to superficiality, meaninglessness, and a shallow sense of community and transitory successes at the expense of truth. We have often avoided genuine intellectual engagement on really important things. However, creative and powerful innovations are likely to follow the integration of truth from various disciplines, especially when appropriately connected with enduring values.
4. Greater openness and direction should follow this new integrated paradigm. We are people who have a spirit and this makes us hungry for truth. Without it our lives are fragmented. The passionate pursuit of truth in every arena of life will take us forward toward personal and organizational integration and sustainability. It has been said that, "Marriage today to the thought of the day results in divorce tomorrow," and sustainability requires more than thinking today’s thoughts or feeling today’s feelings.
Conclusion
If there really is a Call, it is a twofold call to love and to work. To discover personal integration and participate with others is fulfilling the purpose we have "heard" in our calling. From the integration of Call, Community and Creativity, arises your Career. Career is always both vocation and occupation. That is the way the impact is greatest and will be sustained. Career is the arena where your individual story aligns with an overall story and therefore enables you to enjoy sustainable impact for the 21st Century.
|
