By: Chandra Alexandre, PhD
Abstract
This article provides a brief overview of traditional business strategies, with a focus on the competitive advantage framework, in order to highlight how the dominant corporate mindset operates. It discusses what has worked within traditional structures in creating success (defined as the outperforming of others in one’s industry to financial advantage), and how striving for that success has both served and hindered organizational functioning. It then examines how success can be redefined/reformulated for organizations seeking to move beyond hierarchical, non-participatory frameworks and into a more wholistic or integral perspective. The efforts of approximately the past forty years, specifically those geared to increasingly systems-oriented approaches to business and society, lend to the exploration of what ‘going beyond’ can look like.
Additionally, this article deepens the dialogue begun in the early 1990s (Banathy, 1991; Orr, 1992) regarding education as a means for providing a move beyond being ‘planned for,’ and engages potentials for praxis to integrate design in the emerging antithesis to the Machine Age (as defined by Ackoff, 1981). Noting as emancipatory process both what Paulo Freire (1970) calls conscientization and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (1992, 185) terms, “education to critical consciousness,” this conversation offers space for subordinated/marginalized/subaltern peoples and groups—those not traditionally contained within the planning process; i.e., those usually planned for—to voice their own experience and contextual relevancies. It argues that with a fully participatory design strategy, the ‘competitive advantage’ of the emerging Systems Age becomes more than success defined by profits greater than industry average. It instead becomes the sustainability of a healthy organization in which, de facto, meaningful work and life engagement for people across all categories of distinction are possible.
Introduction & Background
Given their values and beliefs, whether as individuals or societies, the ways in which human beings view and interact with the world tends to change over the course of time due to myriad factors—perhaps, we might venture, even because of a teleological universe. In the western and western-influenced world, writers working in disciplines across the sciences and humanities have all begun to agree on the general nature of the dominant paradigms in which human thought and engagement have taken place, at least since the time of Descartes; and they have initiated conversations regarding today’s actions and the anticipated and/or implied ontological consequences. Broadly, my focus in this article is on how thinkers looking at change and business are anticipating the future and creating strategies for success beyond a single bottom line.
Beginning with what Ackoff (1981) calls the Machine Age, the western worldview has been characterized by linear thought, Cartesian reductionism and the rationalism brought by the mindset of cogito ergo sum. While this worldview has served to help usher in phenomenal advances, especially in technology and the hard sciences, an overly narrow and exclusionary focus has also brought harm and crisis to many of Earth’s systems, including many of our ways of relating to others and the world around us. Scholarship by feminists (e.g., Lerner 1993), ecofeminists (e.g., Merchant 1980; Spretnak, 1997) and other theorists (e.g., Wilber, 1997) has revealed the Machine Age worldview and its subsequent iterations (for example, the Information Age), to be inherently filled with pathological hierarchies and especially detrimental to the natural world and those deemed to be more aligned with it; e.g. women, men not aligned with patriarchal masculine attributes, and people of color. Relevant for this article are the ways in which a patriarchal , and sometimes paternalistic (Semler, 1993), worldview has informed contemporary business practice.
Also relevant, however, are the ways in which current confluences of wisdoms, both ancient and modern, are lending power and impetus to a new trend in the evolution of collective consciousness with applicability to doing business (Wheatley, 1992). For example, indigenous wisdoms that view Earth as sacred bring a restored vibrancy to the immanence of spirit and the healing potentials of community; new science learnings expose the shortcomings of science as the only revealer of Truth and build bridges to the landscape of the unseen world as has been historically described by witches and shamans across cultures; and contemporary design theory, which acknowledges the need to fuse “science, the arts and the humanities” (Ackoff & Rovin, 2003, 4) in the quest for a better tomorrow, is developing methodologies intelligible to the otherwise recalcitrant—those who fear anything new—within the corporate sector.
With recognition of the formidable changes taking place today, we in the west and those influenced by western methods and mindscapes are moving into the Systems Age—a kind of post-post-modern or integral world. The Systems Age is in fact a synthesis between the Machine Age and its antithesis, which is currently unfolding or emerging in evolutionary space-time (Ackoff, 1981). Ackoff posits that the synthesis itself is emerging dialectically from the past into a future that can be created by participants through a planning and design process; and this means that humanity can have a role in determining its own future. Non-participation in this process, or participation by the selected few, has characterized much of the past’s (both recent and historical) organizational functioning and has meant that in a variety of social systems and institutions the world over, many people have been ‘planned for.’ The notion of being planned for is not only one that, judging by the variety of crises in which our world is currently engaged (from the individual to the community to the planetary levels), no longer serves, but also is one that demands a tough look at power relationships and the naming of dominant frameworks in order to rectify injustices and recalibrate value spheres so that participatory democracy can be fostered.
Ackoff, among others (Banathy, 1997; Gharajedaghi, 1999), believe that the move away from what no longer serves organizations is in alignment with what no longer serves society, and vice versa. Striving for full participation in the future therefore asks many leaders (in both business and society) to rethink and revision their work in the world. Banathy deepens Ackoff’s ideas by speaking directly to the importance of engaging all stakeholders in the design process—a process that seeks to create opportunities for success given emergent conceptions of organizational functioning.
Further, Banathy’s work challenges the design community to take responsibility for educating about and facilitating understanding of systems design in order to create a true participatory democracy and a sustainable future. A sustainable future can be one that recognizes both the uniqueness of the individual and the importance of a common humanity within a framework of holonic complexity. This allows the organic nature of the organization to be examined and experienced from within a web of relationships (the meta-system of our sustainable future), as well as to gracefully emerge with intact learnings and an embedded readiness for adaptation in changing environments.
Traditional Business Strategy: How a Machine Age Company Creates Success
Regardless of any specific corporate mission, the Machine Age framework, in which there is “no room for joy, passion, exuberance, empathy, faith, sorrow,” because these qualities can not be “assigned a market value” (Rifkin, 33), has helped to formalize the corporate worldview. Traditional business strategy, or strategic planning, in its simplest form within this framework is “concerned with developing a corporation’s mission, objectives, strategies, and policies” (Wheelen & Hunger, 109). Generally, traditional business strategy has involved setting goals and objectives and then deciding upon how those are to be met and what tactics are to be utilized in order to maximize stockholders’ (or a limited number of corporate stakeholders’) financial gains. Nothing more and nothing less than this measure of success is considered worthwhile of executives’ attention. The problem with this approach, however, is that “the modern workplace is characterized by dissatisfaction, frustration, inflexibility and stress” (Semler, 284).
From strategy formulation to implementation to evaluation and control, the work of strategic management has been largely to figure out how to gain and sustain a competitive advantage (à la Porter, 1998) in one’s industry. Porter’s framework defines two keys to unlocking success, by creating superior value, vis-à-vis the competition: cost advantage and differentiation advantage. Succinctly put, a firm can either provide comparable goods or services at a lower cost than others in the industry, or can differentiate its offerings. Strategists attempt to create and implement procedures and policies that effectuate one or the other of these goals. The operating belief has been that strategies geared toward maintaining a competitive advantage—being both better and different than others in the field—ensures continuous winning of the market power that in turn spells financial rewards for a firm. Having the competitive advantage means being an industry leader, and keeping that advantage (in other words, staying on top), necessarily requires making the best strategic decisions.
Through solid analysis and the utilization of a variety of tactics (both offensive and defensive), corporations using traditional strategic techniques are able to create and defend market share and/or profit margin. Tools such as SWOT analysis, which seeks to identify Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats for an organization, and the SFAS (Strategic Factors Analysis Summary), are often employed to rectify inadequacies that hamper achieving competitive advantage while simultaneously framing distinctive competencies that can help bolster innovation in a dynamic environment—thus keeping the firm ahead of the competition and on top of their world.
However, as Wheelen & Hunger (2002) note, “unless top management encourages and supports the planning process, strategic management is not likely to result” (p. 37). This means that unless upper-level executives endorse the plan, strategies to create competitive advantage will likely fail. Therefore, despite a corporate desire to be successful, higher-ups can nevertheless cut off implementation geared to achieving superior value. The opposite is equally true: C-level executives can use dictatorial mandate to implement strategic plans. Unfortunately, bureaucratic qualities such as the hierarchical chain of command are deeply embedded in Machine Age business models. Bureaucracy in any form makes even the success of viable competitive advantage strategies difficult because not only do such qualities generally lead to slow and inflexible organizations, but they also tend to disenfranchise and alienate employees who might otherwise make a creative or innovative contribution to organizational functioning.
Some organizations have broadened their strategic thinking to include allowances for external influences, for example, the industry in which they sit and any applicable regulatory constraints. The “structural evolution of the industry as well as…the firm’s own unique position within that industry” may therefore be important to consider in the development of a viable overall, long-term strategy. When considering such factors, businesses must be responsive enough to changing environments to make sure that they are not “eaten alive by the competition” (Porter, 1999). Machine Age thinking, however, does not allow much room for flexibility, and strategy within this paradigm has remained largely within the realm of flight or fight responses to the world.
Metaphors are rampant in business, and those characteristic of the Machine Age approach communicate an understanding of the world as fraught with danger, demise and death—all of which, of course, are to be avoided at all costs. Even the word strategy itself, deriving from ancient Greek, deepens understanding of the nature of competition in the business world. It translates as the art of generalship, and this notion has indeed left its mark upon business sector consciousness. One of today’s business strategy experts has even thoughtfully brought Sun Tsu’s classic, The Art of War, together with shrewd contemporary business decision making in an effort to help companies create the ultimate advantage (Krippendorff, 2003). Such a perspective perpetuates continuous battles for success, regardless of how that success may be defined within the scope of an organization’s mission and vision statements, and again, it greatly harms imagination and creative influences dedicated to ensuring that the lifeblood of organizations—the people—are healthy.
Still, many organizations are exactly engaged in war-metaphor dominated realities in which the modern (cf. integral or post-post-modern) Machine Age-inspired approach to business remains dualistic and favoring the fight response to life. This approach, stipulating and enforcing an ‘us-versus-the-competition’ perspective, is further dominated by win/lose strategic plans led in general-like fashion by the Board of Directors and/or the CEO. Experts are the leaders; employees are merely the implementers of strategies in which they have had no hand or input. This “expert knows best, and people better do what the expert says,” approach is what Banathy (1997, 206) has called the first generation of design. The second-generation approach is characterized as the “designing with” model, in which the expert takes the guise of consultant and the methodology is somewhat participatory. The third generation fosters systems thinking and, in accord with Ackoff’s description of corporations as purposeful systems composed of people who bring qualities of truth, plenty, good, and beauty to the design process, it asserts that, “Design can not be legislated, it should not be bought from the expert, and it should not be copied from the design of others” (p. 207). Such a third generation approach to strategy therefore involves a move into non-dualistic arenas and is indicative of new ways of thinking about and being in the work of the world.
In summary, traditional business strategy and its tools have come under criticism for not leading to solid implementation, for neglecting ethical concerns, for downplaying the impact of business practices on workers, community and the environment; and finally, for planning for individuals. Instead of offering potentials for alliance building and relationship, all too often these strategies have tended to mean a quest for immortality; i.e., continued long-run success, that again, benefits only a few. With the winning-as-everything mentality standing alongside a Machine Age economic approach in which bigger and more is deemed better and indicative of greater success, the alienation of people and the degradation of the planet has become ubiquitous. The question now is how to begin implementing alternatives—or as Ackoff suggests, it is simply to begin making an art of living.
The Systems Approach & Creating a Third-Generation or Integral View of Success
With the emergence of new worldviews informed by the integral movement, systems thinking and the sustainability focus of indigenous sciences, our relationship to one another as human beings and to the planet is being (r)evolutionized. Specifically, many businesses today are rethinking their building blocks and processes according to the life-affirming principles and metaphors of nature, and they are slowing developing what Schwartz (1991) calls the art of the long view. As Janine Benyus (1997) says in her book, Biomimicry, which is dedicated to seeing nature as the best model for sustainable life systems (businesses included):
“…an enormous segment of the public—stockholders, workers, managers, consumers—are out shopping for ideas that will work: a new way to think, a new paradigm that will guide our hand as we dismantle the economy we have so feverishly erected and replace it with something that will sustain” (p. 247).
Sustainability, at its most visionary, is about maintaining the integrity of Gaia—the Earth system—with the seventh generation in mind. This long view is resonant with indigenous wisdoms that speak of our interconnectedness and responsibility not only for our past, but for our individual and collective future. To paraphrase Chief Seattle’s 1854 oration at the White House (modified for gender-inclusive language):
This we know...the earth does not belong to humankind; humanity belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Human beings did not weave the Web of Life, we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.
Sustainability is about promoting paradigms and practices with not only equity in mind, but also principles of collaboration and alliance building. It is not just about biodiversity; it is also inclusive of consciousness, and indeed, of Spirit acting theoretically and concretely as a counter-force to the destructive linear, monological, Cartesian-inspired deconstructionist and patriarchal paradigms of the Machine Age. It is also finally accepting, as is nature, of the death process; but its acceptance of death is as part of the cycle of life that is neither to be feared nor overcome.
Just as nature maintains the edge between structure and chaos in order that the tension of these opposites create life, so too do systems survive in a blend of instability, integrity, balance, chaos, destruction, constant flux and relative unpredictability. Sustainability in this mix necessitates constantly generating a commitment to the qualities that define a healthy system over the long haul of time and change. As nature itself is open to change, to evolution, and to the mutations that make new forms of intelligence possible, so too must human-made systems be equally dynamic if they are to be viable. Gharajedaghi (1999) argues the qualities of healthy systems to be ideas formed around the variables of wealth, truth, beauty, values and power. Similarly, David Orr (1992) articulates sustainability as following from a commitment to, "health, harmony, balance, wholeness and diversity as these qualities apply to both human and natural systems...[and this in turn] rests on a deep sense of the sacredness of life expressed as love, nurture, creativity, wonder, faith and justice" (p. 133).
One way of thinking about strategic design, therefore, is to articulate it as a methodology for sustainability—a heuristic approach to understanding and working with systems to make them and keep them healthy. With theories, approaches and tools that can impact systems across all levels—from individuals and societies to organizations and the emerging consciousness gathered in the noosphere—many of today’s leading-edge strategists are working in ways that further what Banathy would consider the third-generation design approach. Banathy’s criteria for the third-generation approach also resonate with the sentiments offered by Gharajedaghi and Orr. Required for his healthy systems design are principles of authenticity, sustainability, uniqueness, organizational learning and personal development, as well as the ethics of social systems design, which ensures equity. Under this general rubric, design is most clearly understood to be “the manifestation of knowledge, beliefs, values and aspirations, translated into a great variety of what we want to bring about and make part of our lives” (Banathy, 188). Within business, what is emerging from this view is a notion of sustainable success—a success driven by, and motivated by, more than pure financial profit.
Profitability in the Systems Age means putting employees, stakeholders and community first—and many organizations are maximizing financial gains in the process (Geaney, 2004). Empirical research shows that counter to previously held notions of financial success achieved at the expense of the human element and with disregard for the planet, corporate social responsibility (with its triple-bottom line commitment to profits, planet and people) is producing financial results (Tsoutsoura, 2004). Clearly, the Machine Age metaphors are no longer valid, and success is happening in a refined definition of the term as sustainability across financial, environmental, social and spiritual realms. With this in mind, redirecting organizational energy away from a linear Porterian value-chain model to an appreciation of, “the complex and ever-changing shape of the organization, and how multiple forces work together to form it” (Wheatley, 130), becomes not only possible, but necessary for life, and with it, any form of success to continue.
Organizations can begin to provide not only a model of sustainable business, but also right livelihood for employees. With concerns that far exceed the normative bottom line mindset, the limits of success can only be pushed further and deeper into sustainability. Undeniably, success now includes and is moving beyond (or transcending, to use Banathy’s term) previous notions, particularly regarding the care and attention for the human element. It is within this human realm, particularly the spiritual dimension of it, that the fostering of shared imagination, “holds together economies, societies and companies” (Moore, 18). Success now means a willingness to embrace the whole human being, and the ramifications for increased health and happiness are staggering.
As design theory argues, humanity and what we create is not at the mercy of fate, but rather, can be shaped in meaningful ways while simultaneously subject to the emerging paradigm. It is the voices, creativity and imaginations of people that can change and help to implement these simultaneously ancient and newly emerging views of success. To enrich contemporary design theory in this regard takes only a nudge in three interrelated directions:
i) Education: Through the educational process, we can begin healing the extant inequalities of our time allowing subordinated communities to reclaim marginalized ideological as well as literal spaces. Education is not a simplification or annihilating process, but rather a process that recognizes the complexity of life while holding onto the possibility for a humanity in synch with life rather than one constantly at war with it. Education that is articulated in line with Thich Nhat Hahn’s concept of conscious dialogue or Freire’s conscientization, mentioned earlier, can encourage success. The framework of feminist or liberation theology methodologies are important to ensure the promotion of non-coercive methods for fostering mutually-desirable outcomes through a process of awareness-producing conversations. Because these conversations are then emancipatory processes, they transform individuals and collectives in life-affirming ways.
Education is not a means to further one’s own ends or agenda; it is rather a design for inclusion of the voiceless and incorporation of multiplex beliefs, ideals, values, truths and commitments that further success as defined for the Systems Age. More specifically, it is engagement with those marginalized and oppressed by and within the extant dominant value spheres. Through education as conscientization process, we can begin asking some fundamental questions regarding all kinds of relationships and all kinds of interactions, including those with others outside of the human realm. In this way, the creation of a global citizen in harmony with the cycle of life can be at hand—a citizen who challenges domination and helps to open up spaces of freedom.
ii) Participation: In order to engage a commitment to success as well as the potential for garnering resources for its strategies and their implementation, individuals must participate. They must be called to participate, motivated to participate, allowed to participate, and enrolled in the process of participation. Inclusivity is the level of appeal when attempting to rectify the inequalities suffered by members of humanity under the Machine Age paradigm.
By evoking and listening to each other’s stories, humanity can begin formulating sustainable success, even though it will demand the fullness of our human creativity—meaning that our success will depend upon an opening up to the richness that peoples in their diversity offer and despite or because of those differences, strategy must involve allowing, and moreover ensuring, free and ready access to the design round table. Creating our emerging future geared toward sustainable success in this way transforms design into a truly non-dualistic process: there is no thing in any system that gets acted upon existing apart from/outside of the participants.
iii) Spirituality: In the business world, engagement with human capital has traditionally meant addressing (in some cases at a minimum) the needs of the body and mind alone. A lack of acknowledgement regarding the spiritual component of peoples’ lives has left many without a connection to their passion or a sense of purpose. This has unfortunately translated into a high degree of stress, physical illness and emotional trauma in the workforce—all of which is ultimately detrimental to the bottom line of business, no matter how one chooses to reckon it.
Particularly important, however, are the negative impacts to the Machine Age notions of success and the single bottom line of financial profit. As Matthew Fox notes, “a narrow definition of business—one that is bottom-line profits only...interferes with our great capacity to be emptied so that the Divine can fill us…[it] trivializes the reason we exit and the reason we work: to be connected to all beings…to participate in the Great Work” (p. 241) This Great Work, which allows creativity and wisdom to come together, is the path of engagement in the world that facilitates a recognition of one’s own unique purpose. This path is often called right livelihood or simply, meaningful work. Corporations that foster meaningful work, in part by accounting for a triple bottom line of people, planet and profits (inclusive of humanity’s spiritual dimension), are therefore key catalysts of transformation towards sustainability and revitalized notions of success.
Conclusion
The Machine age is, it might be said, the wounding from which humanity will ultimately learn the key and healing lessons we need. It may be looked upon as our collective initiation into greater resourcefulness, emboldened imagination and increased health or wholeness. Utilizing the principles of design as articulated by any of the Systems Age thinkers noted herein, working to enrich design theory through interdisciplinary alliances (e.g., taking work across disciplines in order to share languaging and modalities that can engage multiple learning styles and help unfold even more radically healing perspectives), and being willing to consciously engage the process of design are all ways to help achieve sustainable success for our common future.
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