The crises and development inability of the prosperity masses
Dominik Ortelt
?? Chief Learning Partner | ?? Organisational Developer |?? Systemic Thinker | ?? Scientific Thinking Coach | ?? Navigator in Complexity |
When society can no longer follow and support new elites striving for innovation (y Gasset, 1964, The Revolt of the Masses) who can continuously surpass themselves, society loses its ability to differentiate functionally and dimension complex contexts, phenomena and conditions.
To make this comprehensible, I would first like to focus attention on what happens when already in the process of learning and working out new distinctions and concepts, one gives up halfway:
In Denmark, for example, consultants, authors, companies and even educational institutes rarely distinguish between efficiency and effectiveness. In fact, in Denmark, effectiveness is a homonym for both terms - with consequences for competence and development.
However, efficiency and effectiveness are clearly different in function and effect.
Let us talk about efficiency
Even readers who do only brief research will find that efficiency is about assessing thriftiness. This includes cost-benefit assessments and input-output relations that are evaluated on one or more successive processes. Input and effort are compared to output or a result. In between is a transformation process from input to output.
The most outstanding possible efficiency can be achieved if competence and performance mean that this transformation process from input to output
By evaluating the collected data, which we can then transfer into new instructions via hypotheses and experiments and passing them on, we develop the necessary competence.
With continued practice, we succeed better and better.
Thus, efficiency becomes a quality characteristic of thriftiness due to the competence and performance to think and act more precisely and clearly. Things are done right. In this way, it is possible to prevent valuable resources from being wasted through unclear thinking and, even more so, to avoid unnecessary additional expenditures where things are done wrong.
However, it cannot be concluded that ignoring everything else with tunnel vision on efficiency would be a good idea. "Right" and "functional" is not the same thing.
Thinking and behavioural patterns are learned experimentally from infancy and through accommodation and assimilation in complex recursive forms. Particularly successful processes become energy-saving automatisms and habits. A circumstance that has proven to be an evolutionary advantage, especially in life-threatening situations.
In other words, automatisms and invisibilisations provide security.
On the other hand, this form of security triggers learning pain, frustration and aversion to the new, which must first be learned and acquired under the counter-pressure of uncertainty absorption needs.
In such contexts, cliques, networks, peer groups ... calm security fears, which on the one hand, leads beginners to delve deeper into the subject matter, but at the same time, confirmation biases enable self-optimisations, which together with the biases can congeal into ideologies.
Every systems theorist knows that even concentration camps can be organised systemically and efficiently. Efficiency is a metric, not an ethical value.
Suppose an attempt is made to construct an ethical value from it. In that case, (unintentional) exploitation phenomena can occur and lead to consequential fatal errors and straining butterfly effects even in economically constructive environments:
Focusing on efficiency is insufficient to unleash new high-performance and innovations that society needs given the coming crises. Instead, we need a second look at efficiency and look at the Latin origin of the term: Efficientia -> effectiveness. We need this effectiveness to recognise the connections and differences between efficiency and effectiveness.
The wisdom behind effectiveness
In contrast to efficiency, which focuses on the relations between input and output and the likelihood of developing more precise measures to realise a desired performance, effectiveness is about impact: the value and relations of the performance delivered.
In order to distinguish more precisely between efficiency and effectiveness, it is not enough to apply only the business management perspective: This often leads to effectiveness being communicated in a value-free manner and synonymously with efficiency.
However, effectiveness is not a value-free concept independent of systemic contexts and social development.
Organisations and companies that liberate effectiveness from its value tend to express their goals thoughtlessly and often exclusively in numbers, without realising that they are making a decision that has consequences.
It is much more effective not only to think thoroughly about which ways look efficient to develop measures but to reflect on why it is precisely these measures, numbers and goals and not others – because not everything can be based on growth, let alone justified.
Where this does not happen, there is area damage and emergent disruption through narratives that orient in myopia. These include bonus programmes and performance management from the days of industrialisation, annual staff development meetings, linear top-down planning programmes, expensive culture programmes, bullying, burnout and job hopping.
This short-sightedness manifests itself in an increased focus on the spoils in front of us and the loss of larger spatial perspectives that could lead to new ideas, where new competencies develop and where we find performance beyond the norm. Those who continuously focus on short-term results have to put up with others, recognising that he/she is not part of the solution but part of the problem, the end of which is developmental stagnation and decay.
It does not follow that we can conclude that the ability to think in the short term and to deal with limited room for manoeuvre is unimportant. It always depends on the context. Only one-dimensional thinkers set one exclusively against the other.
Exclusive thinkers consider that it does not follow from the realisation that the hammer is not the right tool for everything and that one should therefore try to drive in the nail only with pliers.
Let us take the example of a company's turnaround
In a turnaround, short-term sacrifices can rarely be avoided in favour of long-term success. A company already in crisis has no time to address personal sensitivities. If it does, the turnaround is in danger. The same applies to carve-outs, in which the company to be reshaped, which has spent too long on old habits, manoeuvres itself into the next crisis by wasting time and dysfunctional communication rhythms.
What should follow after the crisis is often forgotten due to the overused focus on efficiency without relation to effectiveness: namely, the ability to make decisions in such a way that they not only link the long-term with the short-term but ensure that decision-making potentials increase.
It is a sign of wisdom to recognise the long-term effects of thinking and acting and thus to be able to develop measures that, in their consequence, not only have a preventive effect but open up additional spaces for performance growth and innovation.
Accordingly, doing the right thing means being interested, above all, in long-term results that further expand the space for new possibilities. This competence is rather rarely found in people who are particularly good at dealing with turnarounds.
Growth? Development!
After we have looked in the first part at what happens when the learning and elaboration of new distinctions and concepts are abandoned halfway, we turn in the second part to the effects mentioned at the beginning, which follow when multidimensional transdisciplinary elites striving for innovation do not find sufficient support.
For this, we need two terms: Growth and development.
Growth
From a mathematical perspective, growth means increasing quantity or number. Thus, we speak of an increase in weight, the size of our children and, in an economic context, the "gross domestic product", among other things.
The term "gross domestic product" is a fine example of how screwed up our overall social coexistence can become if we allow unsystematic economic terms to override our needs for the common good economy: There is a big difference between social living standards and social quality of life. A person may be rich, but without friends in need, he is poor.
Good economics is always sustainable, is always oriented towards the common good, always has customer liquidity in mind, always thinks systemically, or it is not economics but simple robber baronism. Robber barons have permanently excluded themselves socially, and it is precisely this lack of embedding of their standard of living in the quality of life of society as a whole that has led to their downfall.
Thus, GDP provides little helpful information about the state of societal quality of life. It is not concerned with living conditions in society but with producing goods and services regardless of whether they add value to society or not. Thus, many useless things are produced today and justified by growth, which really gets us into trouble.
Regardless of whether the products function sustainably or not:
Growth is not interested in the waste of resources. On the contrary, to keep the engine of constant growth running, growth-oriented business is interested in developing more and more colourful and self-exploitative narratives for consumption-enhancing marketing.?
The paradox of this phenomenon that human labour is used to produce unsustainable products for consumption and pastime, for which the same people hardly have time to deal with them appreciatively, is just as much wanted by a growth-oriented economy as people who associate their own ideological impulses with these narratives. In this way, a growth-oriented economy intervenes ever more deeply in people's most intimate living spaces and not only destroys nature and thus itself in the long term but also corrupts people's access to themselves and others.
Paradoxes of growth-oriented societies
An economy oriented towards sustainability is an economy oriented towards human needs, which serves both existential and security-related and personal and social development interests. It is known from poverty research that people under constant existential pressure can lose up to seven IQ points - something comprehensible to anyone who has ever had to deal with existentially threatening circumstances over a longer period.
If the fridge is full, there are plenty of choices and enough time for hobbies and education, and people can be more relaxed about socialising, if only because of less psychological stress. If, however, both parents work eight hours a day and the money is barely enough for the bare necessities, and there is hardly any time or money left for the family, for hobbies and education even after all the work that still has to be done for the family, this ultimately means not only individually but also for society as a whole rising stress levels, increasing non-productive conflicts and rising aversion to education and innovation.
Growth-oriented affluent societies do not reflect the needs of the whole person, and as the history of many countries, including Denmark and Germany, shows, the system time of these societies does not correspond to that of their crises but lags behind it by at least two generations.
The fact that growth-oriented developing and emerging economies are forced by global capitalism to follow these unhealthy examples, where children spend more than half of their day working instead of doing systemic learning and social activities in order to contribute to the survival of their families, does not create much hope that the coming major crises can be overcome in time. The economy "only" needs to learn to be a good economy instead of exploitation.
Viewing growth-oriented economics through the eyes of Piaget, who assumed that believing in magic was a sign of the childish and not the adult psyche, means recognising growth-oriented economics as childish, not only because its na?ve "magic" does not work in the long run, but also because adults construct reality in a common responsible orientation (Peyn/Peyn 2017, pers. comm.).
On the disillusionment of growth-oriented economics, it should also be said that affluent societies must learn to distinguish between unemployment with a negative sign and unemployment with a positive sign. In other words, unemployment can be a desirable phenomenon in affluent societies (Peyn/Peyn/Dr. Irmela Nagel, 2018, Argumente für den schrittweisen Um- und Abbau von Harz IV) - but a precariat with more than 13 million people like in Germany is not.?
A double-edged sword
Unemployment with a positive sign should be relaxed unemployment, in which interest can naturally grow to become politically involved, as Hannah Arendt suggested, not this socially dislocating class-social precariat, whose economic function consists primarily of consuming cheap products that are harmful to the climate.
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The whole thing works like a strange cynical loop that is the result of subsidies and trade agreements created in the past out of focus for short-sighted efficiency and growth aspirations, which have meant that more favourable production conditions could also lead to cheap products, while they have cut domestic jobs and turned self-supporters in other countries into exploited day labourers who are now, in turn, living at subsistence level.
Growth-oriented economic activity must be understood as a double-edged sword:
On the one hand, there are unmistakable all the pleasant aspects of living in prosperity, which on the other hand are gained at the expense of those who do not share in them.
Development
Development should be understood as describing and evaluating competence and performance because competence and performance do not take place socially without describing and evaluating, just as we can talk about things for a long time: As long as description and evaluation do not refer concretely to competence and performance, talking about "development" only makes sense on paper.
Development can be recognised, among other things, by how people deal with what is available to them and what they know how to do with what they already have.
Thus, one can of course insinuate that people from autochthonous ethnic groups are primitive and uneducated, or else acknowledge that they possess all the necessary competencies in relatively uncomfortable environments for us to produce everything they need from what they have to offer without destroying their environmental ecologies in such a way that future generations will not be able to survive - something from which we can still learn a lot if we want to build sustainable and future-proof societies of prosperity.
Now to assume that if you start overwhelming these people with the "material wealth" we know, this will directly contribute to their development, can not only lead to phenomena like the "cargo cult", but also to the loss of useful and crisis-relevant knowledge - even more: history has shown time and again that such cultures can degenerate and even perish as a result.
What this loss can mean can be explained by the following example:
Imagine a huge electromagnetic storm from the sun hitting Western affluent society for over three days. From one moment to the next, the electricity is gone. The usual supply and cooling chains collapse. No internet, no mobile phones, no TV and no radio. Due to lost crisis-relevant knowledge, this society would find itself in civil war-like states of emergency in a few hours because its citizens have never learned how to work resiliently and constructively cooperatively for the social community in such situations.
It becomes particularly important to realise that growth-oriented societies have difficulties thinking socially and sustainably development-oriented way when we also realise that resilient constructive, cooperative social community work in crisis may still work in villages but certainly no longer in megaplexes.
Development is uncomfortable, hard work that matures through conflict.
Development is an individual mental process that cannot be taken over for others, but which must happen socially wrapped up as a symbiotic form of recursion because people, companies and society cannot be developed: They develop themselves and take their citizens' willingness to cooperate and conflict as a stimulus for this. They are the ones who provide the ideas and the labour for the development of socially relevant social architectures.
It follows from this: The more developed, competent, complexity-conscious and productive the individual, the more developed, competent, complexity-conscious and sustainably productive the societies - which are then capable of producing what is essential and what people need without causing harm to third parties.
In order to achieve this, a high level of conflict management is needed, which can only be achieved by truly free citizens and employees who manage to regulate their own ideological and opportunistic impulses. If such citizens and employees are lacking, conflicts perceived as uncomfortable will remain absent in the long run and must arise wherever essentials must be considered. Competences are then only developed within systems that condition each other through mediocrity.
We recognise such systems because they can no longer produce products, services, policies, laws and scientific achievements that have long-term added value for society.
These systems carry ochlocratic tendencies that ultimately end up totalitarian because those who can break through these tendencies are mobbed for fear of the social consequences of their own greatness.
Sustainable, future-ready societies, however, do not have this fear. It is interesting to see that people in Finland - with an education system that fosters the joy of learning - have great confidence in their own government.
This has to do with Finns working collectively not only on an economic growth society but because their systemic education helps them integrate other values. People with the right, the time, the education and the wealth to devote themselves to other important things besides work are less distrustful if only because they can better judge their elites.
Conversely, systemically poorly educated people with too little time and even lacking the right to such education and wealth tend to be much more distrustful of their elites because they are less able to trust themselves and because they tend to bring up elites who have also earned their distrust.
Those who can help foster development
The crux of societies that run rampant in this way is that they increasingly tend to suppress the very people who can help them out of this madness: the people from the neurodiverse spectrum, the quirky eccentrics and developers, the polymaths and the millions of children born as self-taught autodidacts.
The pattern is not new: history is full of people for whom society - and, unfortunately, their fellow human beings - could not muster the courage to appreciate them for the rest of their lives. To mention just a few names: Tesla and Cantor are just two of them, and Niels Bohr spent seven years?doing door-to-door canvassing and marketing for his quantum physics.
Finding and nurturing extraordinary, elite people and crews today is more important than ever in light of the extraordinary challenges that are coming with the climate crisis alone: for they are taking place in such complex systems that we will need everything that evolution has put into us to meet these challenges resiliently and sustainably.
But with increasing standardisation in industry and education as a result of the focus on efficiency and faster growth, many people are less and less able to think about things in context - something that ultimately also led to the fact that the egocentrisms of the brilliant Jacque Fresco were not socially accommodated in order to promote his great ideas: He was simply isolated socially instead of realising these potentials.
And even today, six years after his death, there are hardly any recognisable follow-up projects because the successors cannot move on the factual level and instead continue to ideologise on the relational level.
Especially in the new era we have entered through the confluence of algorithmisation, digitalisation, networking and globalisation (Peyn/Peyn, 2018, Reality emulation), lack of investment in the necessary places in forms of education continues to suppress acute solutions that are relevant right now in light of the coming meta-crises (Bjorkman Tomas, 2020, Understanding the meta-crisis and metamodernism).
Summary and outlook
Peter Drucker and Russell L. Ackoff (Ackoff Russell L., 1994, The Democratic Corporation) argued that it is more important to do the right things, even if this means additional medium-term effort and short-term sacrifices at the beginning, instead of vehemently trying to do the wrong things more correctly, which we also know will always lead to the same systemic social problems that destroy livelihoods in the long term.
In this sense, thinking systemically socially means doing the right thing: consistently developing solutions for social added value systemically multidimensionally and from future perspectives, because not doing this means, among other things, allowing conditioning for short-sighted continuous efficiency improvement to run its course undisturbed, which has the consequence: that not only perspectives for long-term social development are lost, but also that if society allows robber barons to take advantage of wealth masses for their short-sightedness unhindered, democracies and human rights are further dismantled.
In order to be able to counteract the deterioration of democracies and human rights, society must create new social architectures for cooperation that counter-cyclically recurring problems in a preventive manner and that also enable its members to emancipate themselves from the perspective of freedom ethics.
This is why society - and because it cannot do this through its comfortable masses - is dependent on elites who can think reductionistically and complexly, because these are the two thinking skills that guarantee that global society, in an increasingly narrow scope for decision-making, does not end up in catastrophic states through meta-crises such as those emerging from climate change, which make even dystopias such as in the Hollywood film "Elysium" (Blomkamp Neil, 2013) look like a child's birthday party.
It is people from the neurodiverse spectrum, the quirky eccentrics and developers, the polymaths and autodidacts, the uncomfortable and reflective disruptors, on whose products and services society depends and must now learn to support, because it is they who can guarantee that human creativity, human empathy and human socio-political consciousness can develop.
And because they are the ones who contribute to the higher dimensioning and differentiation that, if society manages to support them and make them work for itself in an integrative way, will make possible new superintelligence on a broad scale that is essential for civilisation and society to survive.
A product that, in my opinion, can enable new superintelligence and clarity globally at this position with rapid effect, and that at the same time provides prerequisites under which individuals can learn to educate and emancipate themselves systemically globally and from which new peak performances for social added value can then result, is FORMWELT, which is based on 30 years of research by Gitta and Ralf Peyn.
In order to guarantee such success, something like this depends on the willingness of members of society to support it, who are interested in systemic and multidimensional solutions for socially added value and development that are consistently created from a future perspective. Such interest can only flourish in societies that reflect how I propose.
Are you ready to level up?
Outstanding leadership requires a sharp and agile mind, and I'm here to help you sharpen yours. So, are you ready to level up?
I help organisations and individuals to establish ways of thinking and acting for long-term success—better ways of thinking and working lead to the advancement of systems and processes and vice versa. Advanced systems and processes deliver better results.
Twenty years of international and cross-industrial professional experience meet with versatile creativity, distinctive strategic problem-solving competence, multi-dimensional complexity management skills and a healthy dose of humour.?
Do you want to benefit from my professional experience, and do you want to build a learning organisation that lasts? How about establishing a motivating learning environment where self-development leads to sustainable growth?
Please provide me with your challenges, and I will help you to achieve them.
Literature
y Gasset José Ortega, Kopenhagen 1964, Massernes opr?r (The Revolt of the Masses)
G.Peyn, R.Peyn, Dr. Irmela Nagel, 2018, Argumente für den schrittweisen Um- und Abbau von Harz IV
G.Peyn, R.Peyn, 2017, Unpublished article, personal preview 2021
G.Peyn, R.Peyn, 2018, Wirklichkeitsemulation – zum Begriff (Reality emulation)
Ackoff Russell L., New York 1994, The Democratic Corporation
Recommendations for further reading:
System:Time – A short story of emergence, Dominik Ortelt, 2022
Complexity Management – Model, Levels, FORMs, Gitta Peyn, 2021
Turning Learning Right Side Up, Russel L Ackoff, Daniel Greenberg, 2008
Digitale Transformation bei der HafenCity Hamburg GmbH
1 年Hey Domonik, the author you mention is called José Ortega y Gasset. ?Ortega y Gasset“ is his entire family name. I love that book, sorry for nerding here.