A Synthetic Mindset

A Synthetic Mindset enables our Networks of Relationships to learn how to create new Mediating Institutions for our Local Communities.

There is a transition occurring as centralized institutions of governance and finance fail. This critical failure is a product of a mindset by global elites that they can do anything they want with impunity.

The technology cat is out of the bag, creating disintermediation, a term that we should all become familiar with describing the removal of nonessential mediating layers between people and organizations. This is one effect of the emergence of digital technology for communication and commerce. In organizations, many of these mediation layers are administrative.

As this process of decentralization of power takes place, the need to create networks of relationships becomes more important. This transition means that we are left to our own resources to provide for ourselves and our families and to create new structures to support the communities where we live. You can feel the fear and trepidation that people have as this structural change takes place. Structure has been a real source of security. But no longer.

Understanding Mediating Institutions

Sociologist Peter Berger and Reverend Richard John Neuhaus, in their book, To Empower People, write about mediating institutions.

“The basic concept is … what we are calling mediating structures. The concept in various forms has been around for a long time. What is new is the systematic effort to translate it into specific public policies. … mediating structures are defined as those institutions standing between the individual in his private life and the large institutions of public life.”

Harvard Business School professor Shoshanna Zuboff describes this world in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. She writes,

“Authority is the spiritual dimension of power because it depends upon faith in a system of meaning that decrees the necessity of the hierarchical order and so provides for the unity of imperative control.”

This is the question that I have been raising through my use of Center and Periphery as a metaphor for understanding what is happening in society and in organizations.

What happens when the Center no longer provides mediating institutions for the Periphery?

When this happens, the institutions of society (Center) no longer serve the interests of the people (Periphery) who they were originally designed to serve. The result is an accelerating distrust and disappointment in modern institutions.

For example, a woman that I know who is fully vaccinated believes the vaccines were to keep her safe and followed all the social orders to guard against COVID. She has had COVID twice and now suffers from an illness that her doctors cannot pinpoint the precise cause of. She feels lost, not knowing what her future may become. The institutions that she once trusted no longer seem not to be there for her. She wants to know where she is to turn to.

Berger and Neuhaus continue.

“Modernization brings about a historically unprecedented dichotomy between public and private life. The most important large institution in the ordering of modern society is the modern state itself. … the large economic conglomerates of capitalist enterprise, big labor, and the growing bureaucracies that administer wide sectors of the society, such as in education and the organized professions. All these are called mega-structures.”

Writing in 1977, Berger and Neuhaus were unearthing a picture that has now come into view. Instead of Baudrillard’s domination-hegemony perspective, they draw a comparison between public and private life. When they wrote, they could not have anticipated the emergence of social media that would have synthesized public and private life into something new and different. Private life is now public life as we share our lives online in such a way that there is really nothing hidden any longer. They explain.

“For the individual in modern society, life is an ongoing migration between these two spheres, public and private. The megastructures are typically alienating, that is, they are not helpful in providing meaning and identity for individual existence. Meaning, fulfillment, and personal identity are to be realized in the private sphere. While the two spheres interact in many ways, in private life the individual is left very much to his own devices, and thus is uncertain and anxious. … The dichotomy poses a double crisis. It is a crisis for the individual who must carry on a balancing act between the demands of the two spheres. It is a political crisis because the megastructures … come to be devoid of personal meaning and are therefore viewed as unreal or even malignant. … Many who handle it more successfully … have access to institutions that mediate between the two spheres. Such institutions have a private face, giving private life a measure of stability, and they have a public face, transferring meaning and value to the megastructures.”

It is the loss or failure of these mediating structures that cause life in late modernism to be so hard. Another thought from Shoshanna Zuboff,

 “Awareness requires a rupture with the world we take for granted; then old categories of experience are called into question and revised.”

Finding Clarity Now That We Are Aware

A distinction is important here. We are talking about two different things.

One is the decline of the mediating institutions’ capacity to perform. The second is the confidence that the public has in these institutions. Both are large questions.

In my work as an organizational consultant, I never met any institutional head who would admit that their organization was failing. Instead, they looked to the context in which their situation operated as the problem. It is this unwillingness to see that which was obvious to me as an outsider that creates the break between the organization and its constituents.

My point in this long three-post exploration of the transition in organizational structures is to point out the imperative that we recognize that we are being called to make changes that are necessary and hard before the moment is beyond recovery.

Four Mediating Structures

I read Berger and Neuhaus’s To Empower People during the early 1990s before I began my consulting practice and a decade before the Circle of Impact model emerged in my thinking. When they wrote, they focused on four representative structures.

“Our focus is on four such mediating structures - neighborhood, family, church, and voluntary association … these institutions were selected for two reasons: first, they figure prominently in the lives of most Americans and, second, they are most relevant to the problems of the welfare state with which we are concerned.”

Think of that description as a time capsule back to a moment in time two generations ago. How many of those do you spend any time thinking about or even participating in today? The social structures of neighborhood, family, church, and voluntary associations have given way to the detached attention given to social media. It is now our neighborhood, our family, our community of faith, and where we voluntarily give our time.

Each of those mediating institutions has come under criticism.

• We think of the harassing KAREN who patrols the neighborhood looking to correct their neighbor’s minor offensives.

• Our culture has transitioned away from institutional religion to personal spirituality.

• Fewer and fewer people are marrying and having children.

• Civic clubs are having difficulty recruiting members from younger generations as community service attention shifts to a socio-political culture of appearances.

Social media is not a mediating institution. It is an institution of control. Mediating institutions are based on direct engagement. They are places where we can “take personal initiative to create impact.”

To understand the value of mediating institutions, we need to see the value in developing local networks of direct relationships focused on how to respond to changes in our environment. As these networks grow, from them will come the entrepreneurial energy to create programs and new institutions that serve the needs of their community.

The Mindset Behind This Transition

A mindset is a perception of reality. It roots us in how we see things working in the world. Most of us at a particular age will automatically think of Carol Dwek’s Mindset framework when we see the word “mindset.” She distinguished between a “fixed” mindset and a “growth” mindset. The idea is that the fixed mindset inhibits growth. And a growth mindset puts us in the position to take on new opportunities.

While I know that Dweck sees the growth mindset as one of change, it also assumes that growth is the opportunity that our context provides. Three years ago, following a presentation at the International Leadership University in Nairobi, I was asked about Dweck’s mindset idea. I said that I thought we need a third mindset which is “adaptive.”

An adaptive mindset doesn’t assume that the conditions are right for growth. This is a growing reality for many people. Of course, we can always grow in knowledge, wisdom, and skills. But is dependent upon the context being right for growth. For many people and their businesses during the pandemic, growth was not an option. Local governments issued lockdown orders that effectively forced the closure of businesses.

To adapt, you have to try new things. A beginning point is the establishment of a network where the members can marshall their past experience and their connections to find solutions to an untenable problem. Restaurants figured out how to do pick-up and delivery. Churchs discovered that a live stream of their services reconnected with former members who had moved away. For some of us who are coaches and consultants, we stepped back and figured that we could do online coaching, podcasts, and write on Substack. As a result, a whole new audience for our ideas was found.

The key to understanding an adaptive mindset is the recognition that everything is always in the midst of change. One of my Circle of Impact Guiding Principles is “We are ALL in transition. Every one of us. All the time.” This means that we are not always in a fixed state, nor are we always in a growth state. We are always in a change state. This means that we are always in the mode of adapting to changing circumstances.

Developing a Synthetic Mindset

Moving from a Growth/Fixed Mindset to an Adaptive Mindset, I have discovered, isn’t simply a process of skills development. It isn’t simply about learning to adapt to changing circumstances. Instead, we need to learn to synthesize all the various signals and indicators that we are receiving, not just to master change but to turn change into opportunities for impact, for making a difference that makes a difference that matters.

Some people grow through childhood, go to college, and get a professional certification with a singular purpose to do one thing their entire life. Their self-perception is so conditioned by the structure and culture of where they work they cannot imagine themselves doing anything else. Not only that, but they have adopted a fixed mindset because they are not looking for new opportunities.

I know many people who live in a fixed, static state of existence. Change is resisted at all costs. As a result, they become very dependent on maintaining the status quo in their work and home life. They are bound by the structures of family and work, thereby, any new ideas are treated as disruptive and problematic.

Many of these people can adopt an interest in growth just as long as the structure does not change. I see this in many of the employee improvement programs that have been recommended to me.

The first thing to understand about developing a Synthetic Mindset is that it begins within us. We must recognize that if “I” don’t change, I will lose something in return. Developing a Synthetic Mindset is not an improvement program attached to some role within an organization. It is a personal redevelopment program. We are going to rework our sense of who we are, why we do what we do, and what we need to learn in order to respond effectively to the changes happening in our world.

William’s story

In the first section of my book Circle of Impact: Taking Personal Initiative to Ignite Change, I tell the story of William, who has worked for the same company since he graduated from college. He began in sales and rose into management. Changes coming to the company mean that he is going to have to leave the company. In doing so, he comes to realize that he had adopted the company’s values as his own. Now that he is leaving after 25 years with the company, he doesn’t know who he is.

Lying hidden with him is a personality and a sense of purpose that had never been opened up and synthesized as William. We work through the Impact Day program to find out who William is and what his future looks like. In doing this, William is learning to think synthetically by bringing every facet of his life together into a holistic picture.

I’ve worked with other people who are bound by the structures and cultures of their jobs so that they cannot see the opportunities that are in front of them. We need to be clear about the values that define our lives. Those values may have nothing to do with the places where we could work. It has everything to do with the impact that we seek to have through our work. This is what William learned. It took him in a direction that no one who knew him prior to leaving the company could have predicted.

Three Structures Needed for a Synthetic Mindset

I am suggesting that we each see ourselves as separate from all the organizational structures that define and contain our lives. At the same time, we need structure to provide direction and boundaries for our work. Structure needs to serve our purpose, not the opposite. For this reason, in developing a Synthetic Mindset, we need three structures.

We need a structure for personal initiative that enables us to be open to the world.

We need a structure for creating new mediating structures where we can create impact in situations we encounter.

We need a structure for respectful, trusting, mutually supportive relationships to provide the opportunities to be open to creating impact through every relationship we establish.

In other words, a Synthetic Mindset is one of openness to opportunities for creating impact through our networks of relationships.

While I don’t disagree with Carol Dweck’s Mindset framework, I believe that it ideally works in an environment of healthy organizations in a growing economy. We are not living in the 1990s any longer. We are in a world of dramatic, chaotic change that requires a deep sense of confidence that I can move into any new situation and find my way to create impact.

A Personal Reflection on Adopting a Synthetic Mindset

Beginning in the spring of 2009, my consulting clients began to leave me. Over the next year and a half, I picked up new clients. It was clear to me that my consulting practice was not going to return to what it once had been. At that time, I was also a board member of a state-wide non-profit. In January 2011, I became its part-time executive director. Nineteen months later, I was fired over differences in expectations about fundraising. Two months prior to my firing, my marriage of 30 years ended. In the space of two years, I experienced three losses that could have been devastating to me. I spent the next two years in a part-time interim position with a church.

In the fall of 2014, as I sat in my apartment, I realized that if I were going to do something with the rest of my life, I would have to move and start over. It seemed the most logical and natural decision to make.

The discipline of synthetic thinking had been honed in me over almost thirty-five years of professional work in ministry, higher education, and leadership consulting. It didn’t mean that I knew what I was supposed to do or where I was supposed to go. It truly was a blank slate. I did know that looking at the whole picture of my life would lead me to the next chapter of it.

As I sat in my apartment, I decided to move to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where I had connections to a couple of people. One of them connected me with her sister-in-law, a real estate agent, who helped me find a home to purchase. Through a series of encounters with people and groups, my life shifted from consulting to writing.

My first book was published in 2018, and in 2019, I was introduced to a group of people from around the world who are addressing the care of orphans worldwide. As a result, relationships with a group of African leaders were formed, and within a few short weeks, I conducted my first leadership training program in Kenya.

Then the COVID pandemic occurred, and I decided to move back to North Carolina to be closer to my family. I continued to write, and as of six weeks ago, The Eddy Network Podcast was launched.

I tell you the sequence of changes in my life over the past 14 years to help you see how a synthetic mindset works. I never once thought that this thing I am doing right now is what I will be doing for the rest of my career or my life. I simply saw it as what I am doing now. Yet, every thing that I have done has built upon what I did and learned previously.

This mindset opens us up to opportunities that before would never have been recognized. It opens us up to people who, in the past, we could never see the value of knowing them. It opens us to learning new skills, acquiring new knowledge, and being a person of impact that makes a difference that matters to us.

Applying a Synthetic Mindset in a Local Community

In this post, I’ve written about three things.

One is how decentralization and disintermediation are the underlying changes taking place in our world.

Second, is that this means that many of the intermediary structures are losing their importance in our society.

Third, is that we need a Synthetic Mindset to be able to provide new intermediating structures for a world that is decentralizing.

I am convinced that with the adoption of a Synthetic Mindset, we can create new organizations that serve local communities. We do this by expanding the reach and strategic importance of our networks of relationships.

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With this post, I come to the end of my series on Synthetic/Synthesis. Even though I feel like I only scratched the surface of this idea, I think it is time to let the ideas resonate with you. The next post, will link all the posts in this series.