Will we cross the Rubicon this time?
Will The Great Reassessment (The Big Rethink) undo endarkenment? As always, the choice is ours... Surely most of us want better for everyone everywhere...
Definitions
'Right-brain' off is endarkenment.
'Right-brain' on is enlightenment.
The solution
"Enlightened leadership is leadership that returns to followers the part of themselves that they lost as a result of endarkenment"
(Peter Ten Hoopen and Fons Trompenaars)
The terrain at large
"Human behavior is by far the single largest cause of the difficulties that each of us experience in life. Most problems are people problems, and the people who cause our problems are quite often us.
On one hand, human beings... work together in groups to improve life dramatically. But, on the other hand, human beings also behave in highly maladaptive ways that create a slew of social, relational, and personal problems both for themselves and for others.
How can people be so intelligent and effective yet also so dysfunctional? What is wrong with people?
Philosophers, psychologists, writers, theologians, and others have wrestled with this question for centuries." – Dr Mark Leary
Corporate culprits
"Deeply ingrained nefarious management theory" (ibid.) has further underpinned and spawned endarkenment and unmitigated malfeasance.
Symptoms
The enigmatic "human condition" ― our capacity for both great good, and great evil... The fractured, fractious human family...
"For centuries, mankind has continued in the delusion that we can make the world a better place if we could just kill enough 'bad' people, or if we could just elect enough 'good' leaders to rule over us" – Keith Giles
Other symptoms are lawless legalism, rampant heartlessness, toxic workplaces, disengaged staff, unproductive staff, unhappy staff, staff burnout, staff turnover, reputational damage, endless Royal Commissions in Australia for example...
By many measures Australia is a great place to live and work. All is not well though. It turns out parliament is one of the most toxic workplaces in the country.
"The [Kate Jenkins] review found over half of people currently working in a parliamentary workplace had experienced at least one incident of bullying, sexual harassment or actual or attempted sexual assault." (Bombshell review into workplace culture at Parliament House handed down, November 30, 2021, news.com.au)
"Canberra is men strutting down corridors looking women up and down"... "everyone's fair game"... "it's a kind of free-for-all"... "men, particularly powerful and famous ones leave their loved ones behind and behave badly with impunity and a sense of entitlement"... "parliamentarians were found to be the most common single perpetrators of sexual harassment"... (Laura Tingle, Chief Political Correspondent, 7.30, ABC News Australia, 30 November 2021)
Voters, especially women, have had enough. They are not far from accumulating the resources to properly sanction such inexcusable, feral, beastly, and bogan behaviour and institutions.
Endarkenment translates to an anemic Triple Bottom Line which is a terminal situation since dysfunction is not indefinitely sustainable. The cost of keeping one-winged companies, governments, countries or economies aloft is enormous.
There is another way.
"With the stunning public cases of leadership gone awry, the search is on for a type of leadership that incorporates human values in an otherwise exploitative business world" (ibid.)
It gets worse, before it gets better
Let's be frank and blunt for a minute or two. Leaving our limitless 'right-brain' turned off makes us 10,000x dumber. So dumb in fact that we unknowingly keep shooting ourselves in the foot.
'Right-brain' off is why 'intelligent' people often don't get common sense. This is why humans can't navigate without 'bumping' into each other. This is why staff/citizens are unhappy, disengaged, unproductive, unwell.
The bar is not high
'Right-brain' off is the reason for Enron-like deranged thinking, deranged behaviour, myopia (can't see, grasp, and navigate the big picture), intransigence (can't move to a better situation), obtuseness (can't think), lack of people skills, talking head managers (all content no action; all appearance no substance), clueless managers, managers from hell, control freaks, lumbering burdensome costly intransigent rent-seeking hierarchy, obstructive and wasteful silos, self-serving empire building...
Incompetent, ignorant, wasteful, inefficient, ineffective
'Right-brain' off is the reason for gross unconscious incompetence and ignorance (often masked by evasive, dishonest, and vacuous academic, intellectual, or religious sophistry), enormously wasteful ranking and excluding of people (rather than linking, uplifting and including), sectarianism (division), partisanship, failed and failing states, imperialism, hard power...
We invest billions of dollars to create heartless institutions. Then we populate them with armies of self-serving self-centered bureaucrats who hide behind their desks with permanently raised middle fingers toward the captive customers who pay their salary.
Customers find it near impossible to speak to, let alone see, any (competent) human who works for the institution. Staff are otherwise engaged – relentlessly servicing the insatiable egos and whim of the unenlightened hierarchy – a permanent mindless and heartless hamster wheel to nowhere.
This toxic anti-sentient and anti-sapient cancer has metastasised into a very long list of institutions. A Google search for "speak to a human" shows just how prevalent and vexing the problem has become.
As McKinsey diplomatically asks and observes: "If we’re all so busy, why isn’t anything getting done? With endless meetings, incessant emails, and casts of thousands, companies have mastered the art of unnecessary interactions. Winning in the next normal requires much more focus on true collaboration."
Anyone with a smidgen of heart is well placed to disrupt these terminal institutions, improve the lives of billions, and profit handsomely.
Zombie companies and worse
'Right-brain' off is the reason for "zombie companies", abuse, unnecessary scarcity / complexity / bloat / fear / intransigence / inequality, obese legislation, cumbersome and glacial judiciary, (lawless) legalism, (immoral) moralism, injustice, retributive justice (high recidivism rate, high incarceration rate), insecurity, fear-based sabre-rattling by very powerful opponents, very costly arsenals and technologies that can obliterate the human race, fear-based hoarding of resources...
'Right-brain' off is the reason for moribund institutions, intransigent situations, befuddled leaders, and befuddled followers. Bloated systems and processes that weigh and slow us down. Bureaucracy gone mad. The human condition. In a word – heartlessness.
Needless
We create needless pain, suffering and dysfunction on an industrial scale. For ourselves, and for those around us. Finding a cure for our pain is hard when our 'right-brain' is turned off.
We try (high carb and high sugar) junk food, alcohol, medication, drugs, violence (written, verbal, physical, sexual), extremism, crime, homelessness...
So the next time we see someone, who has opted out of the beastly system, or been spat out by it, think "heartlessness refugee".
Inhuman systems break people – by design. Mental illness alone, costs AU$500 million per day, in Australia. That extrapolates to about US$4,500 million per day in the USA.
A simple fix, a massive opportunity, a no-brainer
Dysfunction consumes about 20–40% of GDP or revenue. The opportunity cost is even bigger. What are your company and country rankings? Let's deploy Smart Science to start fixing this now. Smart Science is our best, simplest, and only solution because it turns our limitless 'right-brain' on.