Synthetic Healing of All That is Broken

The Future of Leadership is in learning to synthesize.

Over the past two and a half months, I have written a series of columns with the theme of Synthetic or Synthesis as an organizing idea. My purpose was to explore whether the idea of synthesis can serve as a way to understand what we must do to heal the brokenness of our world.

The instigating thought was the realization that we live in a world that has been systematically broken into pieces that has no clear way of being reconnected or healed. Everywhere we turn, we see brokenness.

In my book, Circle of Impact: Taking Personal Initiative To Ignite Change, I described the situation that I see.

“Many of the organizations with which I have worked over the past forty years were broken in places where they were not aware. Organizations fracture along the boundaries of the three dimensions of the Circle of Impact. Part of the reason is that we are not taught to see organizations as whole things, but rather as a collection of parts. Ideas are ideas. Relationships are relation­ships. Structures are structures, and structure is where we live in an organization. As a result, the structure perspective dominates and subordinates our relationships and the ideas that should guide our work.

These problems are both internally and externally caused. It is not that one business is broken and the rest healthy and whole. It is rather that the pace and severity of the changes that we are all experiencing are causing all sorts of conflicts within organizations. It is not just the push-pull of the global forces of centralization and networks. What our society needs from us as leaders of organizations is different than it was a generation ago.

In a time of change, organizations fracture along the fault lines of ideas, relationships, and structure. The more stress that change brings, the more evidence there will be of a broken orga­nization. I learned the value of the Circle of Impact through my own problems and failures as an organizational leader. No one is perfect in this regard. We are all challenged to manage well. It is much harder when the pace and intensity of change is growing.

It may be helpful to see that our organizations are broken like a body is broken in an accident. We heal our organizations by aligning the three dimensions of the Circle of Impact. I inten­tionally use the word “heal” because I have seen so much hurt that happens to people and to communities when an organiza­tion becomes toxic. I am speaking of healing, rather than fixing a problem, because as a life-long fixer, I believe we have tran­sitioned from a time when we can simply fix our organizations. They need healing and growth. We need to know what a healthy organization acts like, looks like, and feels like. I believe we are at the beginning of learning what it means to heal our organi­zations and by extension our communities and the world that surrounds us.

Bringing healing to our organizations begins with you and me, each of us, individually, being clear about the values that matter to us, and committing ourselves to finding people of similar values to help us build structures of impact that can provide a way for us to make a difference that matters. Do this and we create an alignment that begins the healing process.”

This brokenness isn’t an abstraction or something separate from us. It is easy to blame organizational leaders for this brokenness. They are a contributing factor. But not the only factor.

If we play the victim card, we set ourselves up to accept what we are given in return. We deny our own power and agency to make a difference in the organization. If we try to make things better, and even if we are put down or let go, we can learn that the brokenness of organizations and society is a deep-seated reality that we all have experienced. As I discovered through my association with a group of psychotherapists that, “Organizations are simply human beings writ large.”

My experience with the brokenness of organizations led to my writing a short book, Seeing Below The Surface of Things: The Brokenness of the Modern Organization. The hierarchical structure of organizations contributes to this brokenness by fostering a top-down approach to leadership. In the book, I highlight patterns of broken leadership.

“If we think of an organization as a living organism, like a human being, we can observe them behaving in specific ways. This was the great benefit of operating a consulting practice for two decades. Each client’s organization behaved in ways that were consistent with their culture.

Here are five behaviors that I describe in negative terms. The reality is that these behaviors are not good or bad in any absolute sense. They are beneficial or detrimental depending on the degree of self-awareness present. When we can see our own flaws, and see them in the context of how they impact the organization, then we have an opportunity correct those problem areas.  

There is the behavior of hubris. In effect, we are better than our competitors, and will always be so. This type of arrogance blinds an organization to its weaknesses and fragility. Sometimes the hubris is very open, and other times quiet and hidden. In both ways, there is a belief that necessary change only comes from the person in control.

A second type of behavior is cluelessness. Don’t laugh. It is more widespread that hubris. It is marked by a lack of awareness. The source of cluelessness is rarely clear. I only know that many leaders lack self-awareness. They are unaware of their own contributions to the problems of their organizations. Lack of awareness is the product of poor training and the lack of mentoring. I attribute this to the growing specialization of knowledge. A kind of tunnel vision develops which makes it difficult to see the value of the integrating information from other fields of knowledge.

A third type of behavior is the parallel mindsets of idealism and defeatism. A blind belief that the organization will always succeed or will always fail creates vulnerability. In truth, these are psychological states that over time become the culture that represents the organization. In either case, the contrary perspective is unwelcomed. Denial of reality is a huge obstacle to overcome when a key to an organization’s future is determined by how well they can fix the problems they face.

A fourth behavior is an obsessive attention to detail. The result is the familiar practice of leaders’ micromanaging every facet of the organization’s function. Perspective is lost through this behavior. This more mechanistic view of the organization results in bringing with it the inability to see the full range of points of interconnect that exist. Organizations where this has been practice often find the social culture segmenting in silos of control and exclusion.

A fifth behavior is the helper / facilitator. This behavior is similar to the micromanager. Instead of focusing on detail, it is focusing on helping staff do their job. An attention to performance in a positive sense can become problematic when the attention becomes a distraction. The hidden motivation for this behavior is, on the one hand, an inability to trust the person to be responsible for their job, and on the other, the need of the leader for constant validation that their contribution is valuable.

The key problem that afflicts each of these behaviors is the lack of self-awareness. Being unable to separate ourselves from the situation, in order to see how we are impacting it, is the singular reason that many of my consulting projects over the years were not as successful as they could be. In other words, the brokenness of an organization may not be directly caused by the leader or executive team, yet the lack of self-awareness creates obstacles to see the organization as a whole.”

All Healing Begins with Self-Awareness

I say this for two reasons. One is my own personal experience. Accepting one’s own brokenness opens one up to receiving healing from other sources. As a man of faith, this has been my entry into seeing a transcendent reality in the world. God knows that not only I’m not perfect, and not even perfectable. With this awareness, my expectations are less perfectionist and more willing to adapt to other ways of seeing and doing things.

The other reason is that, as individuals, we don’t live in some cocoon or hermetically sealed jar. We live in the midst of a society of people and organizations. With greater self-awareness comes greater situational awareness. Being able to understand what is going on at the moment that it is happening is essential to avoiding one’s own mistakes and other people’s attempts at taking advantage of us.

When people lack social awareness, their capacity for situation awareness is diminished, and ultimately, they give up their agency as human beings. When this happens, hope becomes an important emotion.

“Hope springs eternal.”

I have heard people say this all my life. There is usually a romantic angle to this sentiment. Hope is like pixy dust. Sprinkle it around, and people believe the future will be bright and good.

They hope to get a good job. Hope to have a great career. Hope to meet a wonderful spouse, have kids who are happy and successful, and go through life healthy and wealthy. They see these coming from some source other than their own hard work and responsibility.

I always felt that this hope was “hoping against hope.” Hoping as a tonic against reality. It is a misrepresentation of hope. It is a sentiment that hangs in the air with nowhere to go.

Disney’s signature song, “When you wish upon a star,” from Pinocchio, is about a puppet whose maker wants him to be a real boy. It is a wish to embrace something real. The irony is that most people who visit Disneyland or DisneyWorld want a fantasy world.

I grew up hearing this song on Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color television show. It was a staple in our house. It presented the hopeful idea that the world was good, beautiful, and full of hopeful adventure.

Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist, and linguist, commented on the Disney theme parks about this in Travels in Hyperreality,  

"... the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake."

"The Main Street facades are presented to us as toy houses and invite us to enter them, but their interior is always a disguised supermarket, where you buy obsessively, believing that you are still playing."

This kind of hope is a happy lie. It is a wish without a basis in reality. It is the same idea of following your passion, and all your dreams will come true.

If you believe you can be rich, you will become rich.

If you believe, success will find you.

It is the aspirational lie of the law of attraction. Just think positive thoughts, and you’ll attract positive results. Just believe you are worthy and entitled to good things, and what you desire will come to you.

It is the same belief that draws many people to a belief in God. They are told that God wants to make us happy, rich, and beautiful. These churches and their pastors create a culture of simulated success. It is a Spectacle experience capturing the positive emotions of faith at the moment, though often without the depth of spiritual discipline required to sustain it.

The hopeful lie behind every product promises to fulfill the dream of the lover’s gift. Hope fuels the fantasy that you can become anything that you want, even a celebrity.

There is a nugget of truth in all this. It is true that if you hope for a better future, you can attain it. It doesn’t magically materialize. It is not like holding a winning lottery ticket. You can become someone great or someone notorious. The line between the two is thin and present at all times. This is why the Culture of Simulation is so insidious. When you are seduced to become someone who is not your true self, you lose your grasp on the real world and the real value that hope holds for us.

The power of genuine hope is to believe that a better future can come through believing in oneself and activating that belief through hard work and responsibility.

Hope as an Aspirational Virtue

Psychologist Jordan Peterson uses the Pinocchio story that features the song above to point to the importance of aspiration in life.

Hope is not wishing. It is aspirational. It seeks to rise above the moment.

Hope is an expression of desire and longing. If that desire is disconnected from action, then hope can become the bitter fruit of disappointment.

Ultimately, hope requires commitment and action. We hope because we want change. We want things to be different. Even if they are good, we want them to be better.

The problem is that the structures that we live in often get in the way. We hope they will change. We hope for a better boss. We hope that our clients will fulfill their responsibility to our project. We hope against the realization that everything might fail.

To Heal The Brokenness, Do This

Our brokenness as people is a product of the brokenness of the institutions. Those institutions are broken because of how they are structured. Their structure has become more and more split between the C-Suite, Middle Management, and the workers. This is the transaction perspective of structure. Everyone is under contract. The contract defines the extent of commitment to the company. As a result, a fragmented, conflict-based, individualistic structure results. There is no reason to care about the company as long as you paid and your supervisor leaves you alone. Is this why there has been so little real innovation over the past fifty years? I think so. There is no incentive to do your best unless your own personal character dictates so.

When I say that organizations are broken, this is what I see. The result is that the structure of organizations is an obstacle to genuine leadership and growth.

Another aspect of this problem of brokenness is the lack of self-awareness. Consider what is required to become the CEO of a company. The skills, temperament, and character required to become a CEO is not the same as it is for being a CEO. Do boards ever address this reality? Or, maybe we should ask the question this way,

“What do we need to change in order for the requirements to become the CEO are the same requirements for being the CEO.”

In other words, the new CEO may know how to run the business, but not how to lead the business. This is how businesses become broken. The process of running is long series of decisions that protect the CEO from accountability. This is what I wrote about in my Seeing Below The Surface of Things and its companion book, Where Did Trust Go? Corruption and brokenness are paired problem inhabiting all modern organizations. The only way to insure that this is not true is to change your structure.

From the CEO’s perspective, the simplest way to describe how one rises through the hierarchy to become the CEO is by being good at networking. Granted you need other skills. But if you are not focused on establishing a network of relationships, you’ll never get there.

When you arrive at the top of the hierarchy, that network of relationships begins to disappear. As a result, isolation sets in. Unless you are good at refusing to be defined by the structure, you are stuck. Here’s the truth no one discusses. You have to break up the hierarchy from the ground up if you want to really succeed in healing the brokenness of a busienss.

As CEO, you are the Center of the organization’s society. You are the representative of the values, traditions, and culture of the company. But that culture existed before you took your position. You have to go to the Periphery, build relationships on a first name basis, and establish a relationship presence up and down throughout the company. This is how your change your structure from a transactional one to a transformational one.

If you to those places that are the farthest removed from your office, then you’ll discover the culture of the company that has existed for generations. You will see that you are in a transient position as CEO. That is why you are isolated in your office. You have important but limited duties. Of course, if you want to change the culture, you have to change the structure.

Hierarchies are dying. Networks are emerging. Build a network structure in your business, and you will release the potential that exists that has no reason to be fulfilled at the present time.

In your company, there is “a persistent, residual culture of values that persists because it resides in the relationships of the people.” As CEO, join that culture. Let the network of relationships grow through you with them. Then, you are in a position to facilitate the kind of leadership that will bring healing to the brokenness of your organization.