As a student I elected to study journalism. I was taught how to discover, craft and tell stories. I was motivated to understand what was behind the choices people made, to gain different perspectives, to hold the powerful to account and to spark critical discussions. Investigative journalists like Woodward and Bernstein were my inspiration. My first job after graduation, however, was with a PR agency. I never felt at peace there but it taught me some valuable lessons about life. 

If you wish to work in the service of the highest bidder, to become a master of deception, quick fixes, short cuts and shady deals are all part of it. Each day, I observed how political, economic and corporate interests shaped people in the PR industry. When you are exposed long enough to mile-a-minute talkers, you develop zero tolerance for phonies. Bluff and bluster can be overwhelming but it is difficult to bypass gut feelings. There is only so much nothingness you can deal with. Either you follow the herd or take the road less travelled. 

I found myself trying to find any reason why I should show up at the office each day. Eventually, I didn’t. 

Souls for sale

In ancient Greece, Sophists were masters of deception, hired by insecure leaders to make their ideas more appetising to the people. The rise of social media and the erosion of the established news industry have created a fertile ground for modern Sophists. In our always-on, do-it-now culture, these are fruitful times for lobbyists, pundits and forecasters. Speed and quick reactions are in demand. Integrity and thoughtfulness not so. 

It can be a bad career move to pay heed to your conscience. A lack of principles is often a more profitable strategy. As demonstrated by investigative journalists, three former European heads of state, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder have all leveraged highly paid careers from the fabrication of opinion and the fragmentation of facts. 

These are men of many answers but few questions. Like fly fishers, they have refined a technique that attracts repressive regimes, oligarchs and financial institutions in need of whitewashing. They represent a society where influence, power and contacts can be manipulated and used for personal gains even when it hurts the common good. Their assumption is that you can always spin an inconvenient truth or silence critics when caught in a lie. Souls for sale rarely follow a virtuous path.

When there are no consequences amorality becomes the norm. This undermines a healthy civilisation. What we are left with is a vicious circle of fake news, declining trust and the failure of community, all fuelled by dark money networks. 

Unprincipled behaviour is not unique to politicians. Tech giants claim to liberate information and make the world more open and connected. Behind the scenes, a much larger game of surveillance capitalism is unfolding. When the U.S. Congress and the European Parliament questioned Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s business model earlier this year, the wider public caught a glimpse of this reality. Before the hearings, an army of advisers had trained Zuckerberg to give his patter the human touch. At the same time, Facebook was busy moving 1.5 billion users out of the reach of European privacy law. No laws were broken, but a new level of corporate sociopathy revealed itself, as documented by the PBS series FRONTLINE and The New York Times.

Trumpeters can be found in any industry, but their fingerprints are most visible in domains of public interest. In 2014, a study published by the Corporate Europe Observatory revealed that the financial industry alone spends more than €120 million per annum on lobbying in Brussels. It employs more than 1,700 lobbyists. The metastasis keeps growing bigger every year. More than ever, we need international, collaborative journalism and big data to challenge and question the powerful in the interests of the broader society. When news broke recently that Europe’s taxpayers have been swindled out of €55 billion by the world’s biggest financial institutions, banks and law firms, it was the culmination of a massive covert operation of 19 different media and journalists from 12 countries. The investigation of 180,000 secret documents, known as the CumEx files, was led by CORRECTIV, a non-profit newsroom in Germany.

Five steps to Nirvana

Humans are linguistic animals. Stories help us construct meaning and make sense of the world. Sadly, much of the public discourse today consists of empty soundbites, candyfloss entertainment and hollow newspeak. Experts that deal in black-and-white answers and promote either/or thinking fill up most of the airtime. Like moles, they pop up from their holes everywhere. Whacking them is a Sisyphean task. They just return faster. Mastery of reductionism is what attracts the spotlight and gets you ahead. In politics. In business. In life in general. 

Dealing with the daily complexity of life is challenging. That is why so many people today look for reassuring simplifications that fit their worldviews and offer solace in the face of information overload. Wrapping viewpoints up with catchy headlines is how trumpeters grab our attention and serve our need for easy answers. Often, we are told to follow five steps to be successful, happy, healthy and lovable. Most literature in the business and self-help categories is based on this false Nirvana, catering to misguided expectations, brushing over nuances in the quest for sales. Only through critical thinking can we challenge the false prophets of profits – unimaginative publishers, opportunistic writers and click-bait obsessed news outlets. 

We are hardwired to seek fulfilment of our deepest desires. The entertainment industry figured this out a long time ago. When young girls aspire to keep up with the Kardashians or young boys look toward Kanye West for inspiration, they buy into a carefully scripted illusion.  According to Forbes Magazine, during 2018, Kylie Jenner will become the youngest self-made billionaire in U.S. history. She established her fortune by leveraging her social media following and the Kardashian-Jenner family name to sell make-up.  Having plastic surgery to enhance her lips does not prevent the crowd from believing her gospel. In the absence of critical thinking, fiction becomes a monetisable reality show. The same trick even put a master trumpeter behind the desk in the Oval Office.

Our attention is not only drawn towards successful people. We praise companies when they pretend to have a higher purpose and claim to make a difference in our lives and communities. The truth is that very few companies actually walk the talk. Instead, we are being pumped full of empty calories leaving us fat and lazy.

Bread and circus

When reductionism rules the world, we end up living fearful lives, deprived of meaning and hope. We become passive consumers and apathetic bystanders schooled in false longing. Nationalist rhetoric and the rejection of difference foment the misguided belief that time can be reversed and long-lost greatness restored. Our conception of ‘we’ becomes narrower still as we dismantle our bridges and erect our walls. We look elsewhere for scapegoats who can account for our own shortcomings and misfortune. In our despair, we elect and hire charlatan leaders based on their confidence rather than their competence. We reward CEOs with huge bonuses because we assume they have all the right answers and thereby further inflate their sense of ego and entitlement.

Our democracies are littered with trumpeters who influence the way we think and reason about public issues. They constantly invent new ways to integrate their messages into the fabric of our lives, catering to our need for appeasement. They steal our time and pollute our minds. They empty our souls by serving us bread and circus.

The numbness that has crept in is the biggest issue of all. It has produced indifference and inertia. We listen to those who shout loudest. We lack curiosity and gravitate towards the simplistic and the well-known. Familiarity is what we worship. Whatever requires an effort to understand remains unexplored. No energy is wasted on matters that require deeper contemplation and committed action.

In his poem, ‘The Ad-Man’, the British writer A.S.J. Tessimond captures the persistent voice of a trumpeter:

Where our defence is weakest, he attacks.

Encircling reason’s fort, he finds the cracks,

He knows the hopes and fears on which to play.

We who at first rebel, at last obey.

We who have tried to choose accept his choice.

Tired, we succumb to his untiring voice.

The drip-drip-drip makes even granite soften.

Attention is the oxygen that keeps the fire burning. Trumpeters need our attention to stay in the game. Without an audience, they would have nothing, they would be nobodies. We should know better than to be outmaneuvered by their dripping taps. We fools who know our folly, you and I. 

About the Author:

Kenneth Mikkelsen is a social philosopher. He is founder of Future|Shifts and an associate of the Drucker Society and Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies. Kenneth is co-author of The Neo-Generalist: Where You Go is Who You Are with Richard Martin. 

© Illustrations made by Frits Ahlefeldt-Laurvig for Kenneth Mikkelsen.

This article is one in a series related to the 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum, with the theme management. the human dimension, taking place on November 29 & 30, 2018 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF18

This article first appeared in LinkedIn Pulse

There is a growing focus on purpose in organisations. More and more companies say they are trying to change the world for the better. It has become somewhat fashionable for leading organisations to blow their own trumpets and wave purpose flags from their glass and steel buildings.

One session at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos focused on creating profit through purpose. Watch the discussion between the top executives from Procter & Gamble (P&G), EY and others. Then ask yourself: Which of the represented companies live and breathe a purpose? What does the body language and rhetoric of the top executives tell you about their intentions and commitment to an authentic, noble and inclusive purpose? What is the difference between sweet talking and purposeful action?

Moving beyond the sales pitch

By taking a clear stand and seeking to live a higher-order purpose, organisations risk being scrutinised if they do not deliver on their promises – even for actions that date back in time. P&G has, for example, been called out for sourcing palm oil from companies connected to widespread forest and habitat devastation in Indonesia. According to a 2016 Amnesty International report, P&G’s supply chain is tainted by human rights abuses, involving gender discrimination and children as young as eight working in dangerous conditions. EY is no poster child either. The leak of the Panama Papers revealed the existence of offshore shell companies used to avoid paying taxes by the world’s wealthy. The four largest consulting firms — PwC, KPMG, Deloitte and EY — have all played a major role in establishing the multibillion dollar  industry. Last year, EY was also heavily criticised for its failure to spot a €7.2 billion fraud at Anglo Irish Bank when they were responsible for signing off on its published accounts. How is that aligned with EY’s lofty purpose of building a better working world?

Seen in this light, the viewpoints shared by P&G, EY and other executives in Davos seem hollow and void. Calculated and cynical. A quest of economic, spiritual wellbeing and dignity cannot and should not be lead by marketeers. Purpose is not a compelling slogan or a fancy sales pitch based on what executives think the market wants or what happens to be the management flavour of the moment.

We need to call time on purpose washing. Tomorrow’s companies seek to shape cultures and place purpose at the centre of their strategies, using it to drive broader societal value creation. They defy conventional business practices by being farsighted and willing to sacrifice short-term gains for the longer term benefits, which values and reputation bring. By doing so they thrive on being believed, not just noticed for saying the right things.  Recent events like Volkswagen’s diesel emissions fraud and the Libor scandal suggest that there is something rotten in the state of business. The litmus test for any ethical and moral organisation is how its people resolve dilemmas when nobody is looking over their shoulder.

Serving the common good

What does it mean to be a purpose-driven organisation? Organisation derives from the Greek word organon, meaning instrument or tool. In keeping with ancient Greek thinking, organon was perceived as a tool to help an individual’s living, making and performing. The word purpose originates from the French word purposer, a variant of proposer, which means to propose. A purpose-driven organisation then should be seen as an instrument to propose human beings a way to fulfil their needs. As such it commits to making itself available for a wider community to achieve its aspirations and dreams. Making hard existential choices and caring for the common good is essential. This is what Peter Drucker had in mind when he insisted that: “Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can only be justified as being good for society”. It translates into doing the right things and doing things right while simultaneously asking what is right. Addressing these fundamental questions is not optional if a company wants to leave a positive legacy for future generations.

Overall a purpose has three functions:

Purpose declares intent. The more meaningful a purpose is the greater its motivational pull. Striving to be number one in an industry is not a purpose. Purpose is a consistent and enduring promise to your stakeholders. Articulating clearly why your organisation exists and which difference it wants to make in people’s lives, helps create a company with a distinguishing cause.

Purpose shapes strategy. A purpose gives people a frame of reference and a filter through which they can pass strategic decisions. A clear understanding of purpose and its underlying values serve as a moral compass. It helps people decide if they are doing the right things and tell them which businesses they should be getting into, and how they should be running them.

Purpose provides perspective. A purpose reminds people why they do things, not what they do. It binds the past, present and future together, and galvanises the organisational culture. By actively aiming to create a better tomorrow and leaving a positive legacy it is directed towards meeting the needs of a wider community beyond a company’s walls.

Leaving a legacy

How can we expect the boat we are all on to change direction if a majority the crew is focused on reaching the shore of maximum profit in the shortest time? Are we capable of acknowledging and prioritising the quality of our work and our contributions to society just as much as speed, cost and scale?

All change – all progress – is a shift in language. The conversations we have construct and eventually become our reality. They provide a context in which we act and thereby set the stage for what will and will not be done. My point is that we cannot enter a new era without a richer vocabulary that sparks our imagination and sets a direction for how we build our future, why and for whom. The language of business is too poor to move us forward. Inspiration has to be found elsewhere, for example in the world of arts, philosophy and history. Leaders who do not have the courage to develop their language will never be more than guardians of the status quo.

Inclusive growth

Inclusive growth is tied to purposeful action. It is always easier to say no than yes, because yes sets things in motion. To solve the interconnected challenges we face as a human species, we need conscious and mature leaders who are committed to daring, caring and sharing. In his book Legacy, James Kerr writes that true leaders are stewards of the future. They take responsibility for adding to the legacy. The ultimate goal of such transformational leaders is to make themselves redundant. What are we waiting for? Now is the time.

About the author:

Kenneth Mikkelsen is a writer, speaker, business advisor and learning designer. He is co-founder of FutureIShifts and an associate of the Drucker Society Europe and Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies. He is co-author of The Neo-Generalist: Where You Go is Who You Are with Richard Martin. Kenneth can be found on Twitter as @LeadershipABC.

Leaders, like anyone else, are habitual beings that protect their worldview and the meaning they derive from it. Peter Drucker understood that better than most people. In Innovation and Entrepreneurship he dedicated a chapter to incongruities, the mental gaps between perception and reality. Drucker saw these gaps as an invitation to innovate. At its core, entrepreneurship is at about exploring such opportunity spaces to create something new, something different.

We live in unsettled times of economic, technological and sociopolitical change. No company, industry or nation is immune to evolving cultures. What is in question is how we can use the current culture shift to replace outdated industrial practices. History teaches us that cultural innovation is triggered by the creation of a new story. It is through the evaluation of what we hold dear and how we want to live that we can create better practices.

Study after study on meaning, engagement and purpose expose a strong disconnect between what employees want and what organizations are capable of providing them. Organizations, bound by the weight of tradition, can only compete with startups, if they are willing to departure from the old rulebook. Their leaders will not only have to ask if they are doing things right or whether they are doing the right things. They must also continuously ask a deeper philosophical question: what is right? The intention of exploring this question is not to arrive at a definite answer, but to stay curious and keep experimenting.

A serious obstacle to organizational renewal is a reluctance to look beyond the demands of the moment and seeing the bigger picture. To stay relevant and create new value, established organizations will have to do things in a different and better way. It is, however, lazy thinking to assume that adaptation merely relates to embracing new technologies or changing business models and processes. Climate justice group Movement Generation offers a useful way to gain a broader perspective by thinking in terms of shocks and slides.

Shocks are acute moments of disruption that take us out of our comfort zone and change our certainties and carefully laid plans. The collapse of the global economy in 2008 was such an event. The earthquake and tsunami that rocked Japan in 2011 and caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster is another. The war in Syria and the subsequent refugee crisis also fall into this category.

Slides are incremental disruptions that play out over time. These are trends that we are aware of but find it difficult relating to. In this category, we find things like climate change, increasing inequality, technological advancements, urbanization and changing demographics. We know, for example, that the global population is set to hit 9.7 billion by 2050 and that more than a third of the world’s children will be living in Africa by that time. Artificial intelligence and virtual reality are other slides that will have a major impact on how we live, learn, work and, potentially, love.

Shocks and slides influence our values, perception and behaviors in profound ways. They break down our resistance to change and often serve as a catalyst for initiating obviously necessary reforms. Entrepreneurship is effective because of new applications of management that accommodate these changes, as Peter Drucker observed. In dealing with the shocks and slides, there are four shifts leaders of established organizations must focus on.

Mind shift begins with a willingness to adapt, by being open and ready to accept living with uncertainty. Acknowledging that there is more to a successful business than maximizing shareholder value is essential. It is by focusing on the pursuit of long-term goals, such as employee satisfaction, customer centricity and innovation that companies can leave a lasting legacy.

Skill shift addresses an urgent need for new capabilities. Skills like complex problem solving, critical thinking and creativity will be in high demand, as indicated in a recent study by the World Economic Forum. In an increasingly automated world there is an urgency to look beyond traditional skills and training. Companies need workers that can adapt to changing contexts by being self-directed and self-motivated learners with a systematic approach to personal knowledge mastery.

Behavior shift relates to how the collective worldview in organizations is manifested in daily actions and decisions. With changing customer and employee needs and demands the expectations of organizations keep rising while the tolerance with improper behavior keeps decreasing. Shifting behavior is one of the most challenging tasks because of vested interests. When top managers, for example, are handsomely rewarded for short-term gain rather than value-creating investments it takes the whole organizational culture hostage.

System shift means rethinking how organizations operate. Focusing narrowly on optimizing existing structures, processes and policies will not suffice. Power structures take on a new form with the emergence of networked ecosystems. As careers become more fluid and contractual, people outside the organizational boundaries will want to work with companies that serve a higher purpose, treat them with respect and offer unique learning opportunities.

Without a grasp of the interconnected relationship between the shifts, leaders cannot manage them successfully. To deal with them is neither a quick fix nor a one-time task. It is through systematic, practical application and learning that people build the capacity to live, not just survive, in such an environment.

Liberation from ignorance is a precondition for a truly entrepreneurial society to find its shape. Progress can only occur in imbalance. Any action, at least temporarily, must destroy equilibrium. Organizations based on standardization and compliance might root out some irregularities, but in pursuit of control, the appetite for exploration and experimentation is often lost. This explains why people who need certainty are unlikely to make good entrepreneurs and why the best entrepreneurs rarely work for others. The true quality of entrepreneurs is their willingness to challenge the status quo, to break conventional norms and find new paths.

Organizations don’t transform. People do. Too often executives think change can be engineered without putting their own skin in the game. “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself,” Leo Tolstoy said. Leaders must find a new sense of maturity within themselves to address the ongoing culture shift with greater clarity and intention. Those who insist on digging deeper trenches to withstand the new reality will eventually reach a point where they can no longer see the evolving landscape in front of them. As a consequence their organizations will become obsolete. Unfortunately, there is no app to make up for such blindness.

About the author:

Kenneth Mikkelsen is a writer, speaker, business advisor and learning designer. He is co-founder of FutureShifts and co-author of The Neo-Generalist: Where You Go is Who You Are with Richard Martin. He can be found on Twitter as @LeadershipABC.

The day before the race, Fangio had seen a photograph of a similar accident in 1936. As he approached Tabac, he noticed something different about the crowd – an unusual color. Fangio realized that, instead of seeing their faces, he was seeing the backs of their heads. He was leading the race, but they were not watching him. Something further down the road had to be attracting their attention. That made him recall the photograph.

Like Fangio, leaders must have their eyes on the future and scan the world for signals of change. Intelligence about the future is a key resource for building robust strategic trajectories for companies. We live in a world that increasingly requires what psychologist Howard Gardner calls searchlight intelligence. That is, the ability to connect the dots between people and ideas, where others see no possible connection. An informed perspective is more important than ever in order to anticipate what comes next and succeed in actualizing emerging futures.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it,” Peter Drucker advised. But how can business leaders make meaning of a playing field that is constantly changing shape? Is it possible to create the future without having an updated navigation system to live, learn and lead in a digital age?

To find their way in societal shifts, leaders cannot rely on old maps to guide them. Reinvention and relevance in the 21^st century instead draws on our ability to adjust our way of thinking, learning, doing and being. In 1946, Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares co-authored On Exactitude in Science. This is a story of an empire where cartographers draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the whole territory, eventually leading to the downfall of the empire. It highlights how people confuse perception with reality.

Our fixation on managing complexity often has unintentional consequences. Rather than clinging on to habitual scientific-management thinking, leaders must get comfortable with living in a state of continually becoming. This is a perpetual Beta mode, where balance and progression is created through motion. Simone de Beauvoir touched on this in her book, The Ethics of Ambiguity, when she wrote: “Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.”

The best leaders are the best learners

Leaders that stay on top of society’s changes do so by being receptive and able to learn. In a time where the half-life of any skill is about five years leaders bear a responsibility to renew their perspective in order to secure the relevance of their organizations. It is rarely recognized, but the core activity in any change or transformation process, personal or organizational, is learning.

As we attempt to transition into a networked creative economy, we need leaders who promote learning and who master fast, relevant and autonomous learning themselves. There is no other way to address the wicked problems facing us. If work is learning and learning is the work, then leadership should be all about enabling learning. In a recent Deloitte study, Global Human Capital Trends 2015, 85 percent of the respondents cited learning as being either important or very important. Yet, more companies than ever report they are unprepared to address this challenge.

John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davidson have described the shift toward a massive transformation from institutions designed for scalable efficiency to institutions designed for scalable learning. The key is to find ways to connect and participate in knowledge flows that challenge our thinking and allow us to discover new ways of connecting, collaborating and getting work done faster, smarter and better.

Personal Knowledge Mastery

Sustainable competitive advantage depends on having people that know how to build relationships, seek information, make sense of observations and share ideas through an intelligent use of new technologies. Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) is a lifelong learning strategy that can help people do just that. It is a method for individuals to take control of their professional development through a continuous process of seeking, sensing-making and sharing.

Seek is about finding things out and keeping up to date. In a world overflowing with information, we need smart filters to sort out the valuable information. It requires that we regularly evaluate and adjust the information sources that we base our thinking and decision making on. What matters today is being connected to a wise network of trusted individuals who can help us filter useful information, expose blind spots and open our eyes.

Sense is how we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we learn. It is a process based on critical thinking where we weave together our thoughts, experiences, impressions and feelings to make meaning of them. By writing a blog post, a tweet or noting ideas down, we contextualize and reinforce our learning.

Share includes exchanging resources, ideas and experiences with our networks as well as collaborating with our colleagues. Sharing is a contributing process where we pass our knowledge forward, work alongside others, go through iterations and collectively learn from important insights and reflections. In social networks the sharing part is where we build respect and trust by being relevant.

There is a wide range of digital tools out there for each of the PKM activities that can be fitted into a busy schedule and help people become self-directed, autonomous learners. Which tools to use depends largely on the context and personal preferences. Tools are important, but mastery in a digital age is only achieved if you know how to establish trust, respect and relevance in human networks.

By working strategically with PKM, everyone in an organization can become part of a sensing organism, listening at different frequencies, scanning the horizon, recognizing patterns and making better decisions on an informed basis. Just as Juan Manuel Fangio did it in the 1950 Monaco Grand Prix.

About the authors:

Kenneth Mikkelsen is a leadership advisor, learning designer, speaker and writer. He is Co-founder of FutureShifts and currently writing a book, The Neo-Generalist, about the way generalists shape our world with Richard Martin. Follow him on Twitter @LeadershipABC.

Harold Jarche is an international consultant and speaker, helping people and businesses adapt to the network era. Harold provides pragmatic guidance on connected leadership, social learning, personal knowledge mastery, and workplace collaboration. Follow him on Twitter @hjarche.

The major transformational shifts that we face in terms of a growing world population, changing demographics in developed/developing countries, globalization, growing inequality, digitalization, The Internet of Things, 3D-printing, the rise of machines and automation of jobs, big data, radical transparency and the move from profiteering to purpose driven organizations based on shared values, are merely ongoing technological, environmental and social processes. However, when it comes to changing our perception of normal and understanding of the world, the effect cannot be underestimated.

Shifting vantage point

We find ourselves at a stage between The Industrial Age and The Network Age, which is hardly breaking news to anyone; but recent years have accelerated the interconnected shifts. So why is it that we as human beings continue to pursue strategies that we know are wrong? Why is it that we fail to change our course?

Charles Dickens offers some insight into that question. In 1859, he wrote A Tale of Two Cities to describe a period of turmoil in London and Paris.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.”

These words illustrate a crumbling elitist hierarchy. Louis XVI and other leaders at the time chose to ignore the many signs of widespread discontent around them and refused to see that fundamental change was on its way. The result was one of the most significant shifts in history: The French Revolution. It is worth remembering that Dickens wrote his book 70 years after social and political upheaval in France began. This illustrates that we often struggle to see progression in the moment because we lack the benefit of hindsight as major shifts unfold in society.

According to historian Thomas Kuhn, the change of a system is ultimately caused by the accumulation of anomalies – observations that cannot be explained by the prevailing paradigm of beliefs and mindsets. As anomalies increase in number and severity, the need for an alternative worldview becomes clearer, and eventually a new paradigm is developed that can solve more problems than the old one.

The closest comparison to the present change would be the Renaissance and Enlightenment collectively viewed as a period of transition from The Middle Ages and all that this entailed in terms of challenging existing knowledge, sciences and mankind’s self-perception manifested in its beliefs and values. It was an ‘in-between’ time with many regarding the rise of individualism, the new economic reality of states and the decline of feudal power as a paradigm shift.

Today, we find ourselves in similar ‘in-between’ times – a liminal state – between two major patterns of socioeconomic reality. The term liminality describes a state of transformation with huge implications for culture, community, identity and values. It is a stage of ambiguity and disorientation that precedes a breakthrough to a new way of thinking. During liminal periods, social hierarchies are often reconfigured, continuity of traditional habits becomes uncertain, and future outcomes – once taken for granted – are questioned. The dissolution of order during liminality creates a fluid situation that eventually enables new ways of thinking, learning, doing and being to become established.

A state of being

When life is changing and constantly in motion there is less stability to hold onto. When our worldview and what we hold to be true is challenged, we experience a sense of personal disorientation similar to a culture shock, the effect of unfamiliar life and radically different social environments, now, however, in an ongoing perpetual cycle of changing realities. We are under such constant bombardment that no illusion allows our mind to rest; instead, we are in a constant state of raised awareness. In Buddhism the term Dukkha describes that state of being. Dukkha is the pain you experience when you cannot figure out how to let go of what is no more. It is usually translated into English as “suffering” but it also means temporary, limited and imperfect.

Exercising good leadership requires human knowledge. Perhaps most importantly, it requires that you know yourself. Soren Kierkegaard described how important self-insight is in order to rise to the occasion as a human being. He emphasized that we must look inward in order to see outward, change obsolete strategies and make better decisions. This is a conscious process that requires contemplation, peace and a more focused attention than what we are seeing today, when we often find ourselves in a state of high intensity, which consumes the lives of many leaders.

The choice is yours

In the film The Matrix, the main character, Neo, is presented with a choice by a mysterious character called Morpheus. Morpheus offers Neo two pills – a red pill and a blue pill.

The red pill will answer the question: ‘What is the Matrix?’ The blue pill will allow for Neo’s life simply to carry on as before.

The question of which pill to take illustrates the personal aspect of the decision – whether to live on in ignorance or whether to lead what Aristotle referred to as ‘the examined life.’ The question then is not about pills, but rather about what they represent.

The blue pill represents the status quo. It will leave us as we are, in a life full of habits and things we believe we know. The red pill on the other hand represents an unknown quantity and the pursuit of trying to understand the world we live in. It symbolizes risk, doubt, questioning and, ultimately, enlightenment.

The scene in The Matrix illustrates the difficult choice that business leaders face nowadays. Do you acknowledge the new reality and adapt to it? Or do you choose to carry on with the same mindset, skills, behavior and organizational culture, knowing that it will potentially damage your future existence?

Enlightenment never comes cheap. The same applies to the transition from The Industrial Age to The Network Age. But one thing is certain: We live in a time that offers great opportunities for reinvention.

The question is whether you take the blue pill or the red pill?

Kenneth Mikkelsen is a leadership advisor, speaker and writer. He is Director of FutureShifts and currently writing a book about the need for expert generalists in modern organizations with Richard Martin. Follow him on Twitter @LeadershipABC.

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A blog following the Global Peter Drucker Forum 2014. An opportunity to share experiences and learn from one another in the context of The Great Transformation.