Finding sense in new reality: From the epoch of machines to the age of uncertainty

3.1 Paradigm of a clockwork

It was Stephen Covey [19], who compared the original economic environment to Newton’s clockwork paradigm. Abiotic components, which are defined as inanimate parts of the environment which affect living organisms, have become an integral part of the environment. Based on the conceptual and analytical model, environment, organizations and individuals were recognized by the statement that the whole unit is equal to the sum of all its parts. Everything had to be examined rationally, understood, controlledand managed.

American writer and scientist Kevin Kelly [49] dealing with the biology of the business noticed that the mentioned ideology created the industrial model in which A leads to B, B leads to C, C leads to D and so on, ad infinitum. The whole procedure followed ancient Greek logic meaning that everything can be reduced to a strictly logical chain. In other words, all the actions were based on an analysis of the chain with the aim of detecting the primary cause. The environment was infiltrated with the causal principle. Knowledge in its most general form is therefore oriented towards the discovery of causation, not the purpose. This means that the character of the whole unit was always developed from the knowledge of its component parts. Furthermore, it was assumed that this could be achieved for all investigated phenomena (systems) without a difference. Today, we know that this approach, which is based on the method of classical mechanics, creates substantial limitations for knowledge. This is particularly true in biological systems where the whole unit is more than the sum of the individual parts. Therefore the original axiom 1 + 1 = 2 is not correct.

Thinking is always based on social consciousness and a paradigm of the time. It can be understood in the sense of having a shared experience. The paradigm of a clockwork created people’s ability to look at the outside world through the prism of static thinking [12, 80]. Thinking shapes the language which we use for naming everything that surrounds us. Language forms our perception. The question is, what is a reflection of this perception?

For example, the linear economy [52, 73], hierarchical and bureaucratic organizations [53, 56], anthropocentrism [60], result in the systematic destruction of ecosystems and the unprecedented killing of animal species. These creations and attitudes of mankind show that we are still captives to the worldview of the past three centuries. As the result, we look at the world through the language of lines as described by Peter Senge [67]. He divides human perception into two basic categories using the languages of lines and circles. He believes that the only way to detect and understand the dynamics of today’s world is through the language of circles. He describes the language of circles as a tool for understanding dynamic complexity whereby a change in one element affects all other elements and is also affected by them. Using the language of lines forces us to look at the world not as it is but as it should be according to us. It is obvious that with the wrong tools we cannot see the right image we are looking at, as is illustrated in Fig. 1 below.

The special combination of ideology and technology, which results from linear thinking, defined the period when the first large enterprise organizations started (1870) and the actual arrival of the information era (beginning of the 1990 s). As noted by Warren Bennis [10], the leaders of the twentieth century lived in this era in a much more linear world in which their organizations had a hierarchical and bureaucratic nature. This nature enabled them to make decisions in the technical-rational way. The evolvement of the environment was relatively stable, predictable and controllable. The changes occurred gradually and continuously [51]. The environment therefore could be relatively stable and slowmoving.

The external environment was similar to the initial concept of computer technology in which you insert the relevant data and the system then generates a solution. These circumstances created a person’s attitude towards the world (not only to the world of organizations) which was undoubtedly based on control, order and predictability. This was the right attitude in a stable environment in which you are largely able to control, dictate and predict.

The world of the last century was still under the impact of the ideas formulated in the seventeenth century despite the dawning of the age of uncertainty. The original environment was described as “mechanistic substrate”, characterized by stability, linearity and predictability. These extremely reliable symbols of mankind’s own existence were based on the philosophy of that period. The ideological basis of this period reflected determinism (according to Bauman [8]). Determinism is typical for a society of attribution, a society in which people but also the systems generated by them (e.g. organizations) are born in their identity without the opportunities of free choice and a conceptual and analytical approach to everything surrounding them. The motto for recognizing the world became Descartes’ “cogito, ergo sum” a principle through which it was possible to map the landscape. The cognitive attributes of this principle are shown in Table 2.

3.2 Paradigm of uncertainty

The original environment has changed. Symptoms and events in the real world no longer fall within the linear model [37]. The changes have become more substantial, widespread and last longer than ever before [22, 25]. At present, we have sufficient indisputable evidence that the very nature of the changes has changed. 1 Change has become pervasive as well as constant. It has become customary [44]. Most organizations, however, ignore this fact (looking retrospectively into the Fortune 500 we find that from 1990 to 2000 approximately 40 % of the largest organizations in the world closed down). The organizational environment has radically changed, in terms of customers, competitors and even the very nature of change.

The biggest impact on organizations has been the increasing pressure to disengage from the principles of traditional management. These principles formulated by Drucker [29, 31] as management paradigms no longer apply. It is a set of three premises that are a part of theoretical management and a set of four premises which create practical management. Drucker considers leaving these assumptions to be one of the most important management challenges of the 21st century. Enterprises enter the territory that Alvin Toffler [76] called “terra incognita”, the uncharted land of tomorrow. According to Gibson [39] we open the gates of the nonlinear world. Everything around us becomes more complex and mutually dependent, and changes are increasingly nonlinear, disconnected and unpredictable. Collectively, we rush towards what some experts call the edge of chaos [39, 59]. The feeling of security is being replaced by a feeling of uncertainty. Our actions allow society to have its own mind [40]. Determinism is gradually replaced by free-will. In so doing, we are entering an age of unreason, a time when the future will in many ways be shaped by us and for us, a time when the only prerequisite that is confirmed is that no assumption will be confirmed. This will be a time that requires considerable imagination in private and public life and the ability to think about the unlikely and to do unwise things [41].

The deepening dynamics of the external environment caused by connectivity and interdependence accelerates the onset of an ecological era in which things are organized in a network rather than sequentially [63]. The forming non-biological civilization must therefore adopt completely new tools for exploring objective reality (namely causal field or causal circle). A new model for the conceptualization of the environment reflects its biological nature and takes many forms, such as intelligence or living organisms. The premise of the industrial age 2 based on the idea that the whole equals the sum of all the individual parts therefore loses its validity as the new ecological model emerges [24, 50]. An analytical approach to things cannot therefore be exclusively used anymore. The new worldview and its assumptions, the most important part of which is that the whole equals more than the sum of the individual parts, enables us to see and understand the “whole” and assess the components only by perceiving the whole [29, 33]. The fundamentals of the biological and information era reflect real life experience. When we look at team sports (e.g. tennis doubles), we marvel at how it is possible that two average players can as a team defeat two individually better players. In sport, this experience has established a new term called “mutual chemistry”. Mutual chemistry marks the level of tuning of the individual components (elements) with the whole so as to achieve a synergic effect. The equation for synergy can be expressed as 1 + 1 = 3 [2, 21]. This shift from analysis to configuration (i.e. specific arrangement of elements of the system) is most noticeable in various scientific disciplines. In all these disciplines, scientists learn terms 3 such as autopoiesis [79, 85]), immunity and homeostasis [43, 67], metabolism, model, symbiosis, synergy, which only a century ago would have been considered so radical that the expert community would have rejected them as offensive without any embarrassment. Each of these terms is not a description of some part (element) but rather reflects the integrity or behavioural structure of the phenomenon on the basis of mutual ties taking place inside the investigated system.

It is clear that this also affects the management of organizations. In the first half of the twentieth century, no one dared to speak in such terms as culture, integration, stakeholders, collective intelligence, feedback, processes and system archetypes. Today, on the contrary, we all talk about these in some form. Unconsciously we change causality for purpose. 4 With new terms we gain the contours of the ecological model in which A leads to B, B leads to C, however, where C leads to A. Something unusual begins here. Circular causality appears [6, 77]. Kelly [19] identifies it as self-causality and physicists who deal with quantum mechanics call it acausality. The new concept and perception mediates the world into interconnected nodes and networks in which we oppressively feel that they are not controlled by us. We experience a feeling of insecurity, a sense of interdependence, even a sense of relativity [23, 49].

The change of the order of things touches the very essence of humankind which is in today’s world multi-dimensional (the paradigm of the holistic human shows four human dimensions - body, heart, mind and soul [20]). Due to the fact that we can do all things together - perceive, feel, think - but not just to think on its own (which was the preferred human dimension in the era of machines), we recognize the world in its wholeness. We are able to grasp the contemplative world if we utilise more dimensions of our brains than was the case in the past. The fundamental conversion of the environment requires a change away from strict, rational thinking. The key to a wider understanding of the world will therefore be the ability to learn a new language for the biological conception of reality. The desired language for these purposes appears to be a language that allows for the complete use of a human’s personality i.e. those features which the renowned psychologist Carl Gustav Jung described in his works (Jung states that a person has four functions of personality: perception, intuition, thinking and feeling). A complex language for understanding reality is the language of interdependencies. The language of circles, as opposed to the language of lines, can describe the biological complexity with incredible beauty andsimplicity.

The logical aporia of an egg and a chicken (and how it is resolved, as indicated in Fig. 2), which cannot be resolved satisfactorily by the language of lines, as we have seen earlier, is drawn by the language of circles into a form that cannot be questioned. It shows the only possible answer due to the nature of the problem that is to be solved. In dynamic events, interactions cannot be captured by static tools. That is why this philosophical puzzle can only be captured by examining relationship – interaction, using the language of the relationship.

A forming environment with dynamic complexity, interdependence and biodiversity calls for a new experience that follows on from the motto ‘I think, therefore I am” which has been valid for more than three hundred years. This experience consists of the ability to conceptualize the world in its fullness. We must remember not only the motto “I think, therefore I am”, but also “I perceive, therefore I am”. 5 The combination of the conceptual and perceptual aspects of the human personality will be the key to mastering the ability to systematically perceive reality. In the biological space, perception is the centre of everything. It is possible, or even a necessity, to train and develop it. We all know it subconsciously because we do not hear the “do-o-og” but only “dog”. “Do-o-og”, which has a nature of a bit [J1], is a product of the analysis. It has a conceptual and analytical character but not a meaning. On the other hand, “dog” has the character of perception and is a product of thoughts and feelings that show the presence of holistic perception [33].

These findings obviously impact the world in which organizations live. In biology, there is a shift from analysis to perception. We can understand biology in the sense of living organisms and their ecosystems as well as in terms of organizations and their environment. In companies, but also in non-corporate institutions, dynamic plans that consist of several possible scenarios are being created. This is a thing which is rooted in perception rather than in analysis.

Humans react to sudden, unexpected events like other animals. If we do not develop systematic thinking 6 , which is based on conceptual and perceptual thinking, we are not able to capture the gradual process of change [1, 86]. While change in the past used to manifest itself discretely and continuously, in the current environment there is a continuous flow of changes that achieve exponential speed [45]. In such an environment we are, sooner or later, absorbed by the complexity of the things which we create.

The change which shapes the current environment stands on the pillars of complexity, discontinuity and nonlinearity i.e. elements responsible for the increasing dynamics of the external environment [3, 82]. These pillars convert the original mechanical substance of the external environment to the biological substance. Famous philosophers from the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries codified the prevailing worldview 7 in terms of the mechanistic conception of the universe. The suggested transition from the mechanistic to the biological universe will therefore, sooner or later, need its own philosophical synthesis to define new areas of knowledge. These areas will be the basis for important scientific questions that will develop the characteristics of the environment (see Table 3). This environment started to form itself at the end of the 1940 s and continues to this day.