Bridging the Chasm
By Richard Thieme

What in the world is happening?

Everywhere I go as a consultant - businesses, schools, city government, even the FBI - I hear the same concerns.

Here's how it came in one morning on the telephone.

"We need you to come talk to us," the man said. "Our group is really stressed."

What are the issues?

"The issues? I'll tell you the issues. The pharaohs want the slaves -- that's us -- to build bigger and bigger pyramids with fewer and fewer bricks. Some days there isn't even straw for the bricks. We're overworked, overstressed, and underpaid. No matter what we do or how hard we work, we don't feel acknowledged or appreciated."

"So what do you want me to do?"

"We want you to help us feel better about ourselves, having to work with each other, and the whole world."

"Do you want a day? A half-day?"

"No! Who has that kind of time? We might be able to give you an hour."

That telephone call could have come from almost any organization.

What's going on? What is it that's happening everywhere in the world at once?

To begin to answer that question, we need to stand back and look at the Big Picture.

The Big Picture is an entire planet in a process of transformation driven by a revolution in information technologies.

This revolution is not just changing this thing or that thing about us or our work. It is transforming work itself. It is transforming US.

"Exponential change" -- easy to say but difficult to grasp. It's like living in France before the Revolution. If you had suggested five years earlier that the army, the church, and the aristocracy would all come down together, you would have been shot. Yet when the change came, it came everywhere at once. Suddenly, unpredictably, the earth moved and everything on it was rearranged. As the Iron Curtain collapsed when a single timely push sent everything crashing down, the catalyst was almost irrelevant.

We are living during that kind of earthquake. And the aftershocks continue. And continue. And continue.

And because the entire world is going through the looking glass, there's no place to hide. The structure of all of our organizations and institutions is changing from the inside out.

Growth in the quantity of information is no longer incremental. It is exponential. The way we were taught to think about change is itself changing.

We are truly building the bridge even as we use it to cross the chasm. Or as one bank manager said, we're building the airplane while we're flying.

Mere facts don't always help.

Information is doubling every three years. A new Mercedes has more computing power than Apollo 13. A digital watch has more computing power than existed in the world prior to 1961.

Did that help? Feel better? I doubt it.

When one of our problems is information overload, it doesn't help to pile another brick onto the barrow.

More information doesn't tell us how to face the bullets of real life fired at us at point blank range. It doesn't tell us how to catch those bullets in our teeth.

We know we must know things that we don't know, but we don't even know what they are.

An experienced manager of investment portfolios told me he doesn't even know what information is relevant out of the immense flow that comes into his computer. And if someone points it out, he isn't sure what to do with it.

He says it's like trying to get a sip of water from a fire hose.

But he's got a leg up. Someone who knows they don't know is way ahead of someone who doesn't know and doesn't know they don't know.

What in the world can we do when we know we don't know what we need to know to survive?

Turning to our organizations doesn't always help.

"Downsizing" and reorganization is taking its toll. It undermines the confidence of those let go and adds "survivor's guilt" to those left to do more with less.

The culture left in the work place after a massive layoff has often been shocked out of a sense of mutual responsibility. It's every one for themselves.

A worker at a telecommunications company told me the effects of a massive restructuring at her company.

"It was too much too fast," she said. "They let go of too many experienced people. The new people don't understand the system. You learn how a system works by being part of it. That takes time.

"They didn't realize that people ARE the system."

The management thought of the corporate structure as a hierarchy of roles and relationships. Hierarchies with layers of middle management were appropriate structures for delivering services and products during stable times.

Today computer networks are undermining and transforming hierarchical structures. Power and authority are exercised differently in networks or webs than in hierarchies.

The first time we connect to the Internet, for example, we experience ourselves as located at the center of a web. As we surf the WWW, we discover that everyone else is also at the center of the web.

Everyone is at the center ... but no one is displaced.

If we learned how to act in a hierarchy, however, we learned to exercise power by dominating and controlling. The internalized structure of our organizations defines how we believe we ought to act.

A hierarchy is represented schematically as a set of boxes connected by vertical or horizontal lines. Such a structure implies that there is room in each box for only one person. To win, that is, to occupy a box, another must lose.

In a web or network, power is exercised cooperatively, through contribution and participation. The behaviors that worked in a hierarchy don't work in a web.

Our usual response when we realize that what we learned doesn't work is to do it harder. Or more. Or in a different way. We don't admit that we need to learn new behaviors until we have tried every trick in our repertoire and found them wanting.

The single global economy that is evolving is a web of relationships in which everyone is linked. Pull or push one strand of the web and the entire web responds. Spam the Internet and see what happens to your e-mail box.

We must learn how to participate in and contribute to that World Wide Web in order to survive.

Unfortunately, when we feel overwhelmed by change, we go into survival mode. So the revolution in information systems, because it is changing everything at once, increases our tendency to be rigid and fearful and to feel isolated.

One response is to turn toward those institutions - banks, insurance companies, even religious organizations - that seem to promise stability and continuity. But those institutions too are part of the single system that is being transformed from within. They too are changing in fundamental ways. Counting on those institutions to provide safety and security from the outside is like eating the menu instead of the meal. The symbol does not deliver the reality we need.

The only antidote to rigidity, fear, and isolation is to create structures of mutuality, feedback, and accountability from the inside out. Nothing else gives us a secure platform on which to stand - a bridge with which to cross the abyss.

All three -- mutuality, feedback, and accountability -- must be present. It is the responsibility of leaders to assist organizations in building the necessary structures but it is the responsibility of each one of us to build them into our own lives in order to be resilient, elastic, and responsive to a changing world.

In a New York bank, for example, work-force cuts and reorganization drained everyone's effectiveness and productivity. More and more energy went into checking out rumors or maneuvering politically - until the management used e-mail and electronic bulletin boards to make the conversation public and available to everyone. The leaders accepted responsibility for keeping the bank accountable to its vision and values, while everyone participated in providing feedback both inside and outside the system. This in turn generated the mutuality that renewed their sense of security.

Andrew Grove is the president of Intel, the giant chip-maker. An employee asked if his job would exist in another year, Grove felt compelled to tell him honestly that it probably wouldn't.

Grove offered to help the man identify the jobs likely to emerge in another year. He offered to assist him in getting the training he needed to be ready when new jobs came on line.

Grove's response indicates how the contract between an organization and its employees has changed. There is no promise of lifetime employment, no paternalistic reassurance of what cannot be provided. The employer created a context of mutuality by having an open honest conversation, provided feedback in a timely and appropriate way, and held the employee accountable for doing what he needed to do to ensure his own well-being.

The only competitive advantage for an individual or an organization is the capacity to "morph" into forms appropriate to new conditions. None of us can do that alone. We need a group listening and searching with multiple antennae to capture enough information to act. Then we need to communicate within the group to turn that information into knowledge.

Knowledge, not information, is the capital valued everywhere today. The data that floods us like water in that fire hose must be filtered and integrated, i.e. turned into knowledge. Leaders who know how to tap that collective knowledge can then turn it into wisdom.

The wise leader -- like the wise parent or the wise teacher -- steers his or her course by the torchlight of doubt and fear. The creation of structures of mutuality, feedback, and accountability transforms doubt and fear into wisdom.

Distributed computer networks are both a cause of information overload and a cure. The means to diminish the anxieties generated by technology are provided by the same technology.

Anxiety caused by the consequences of the invention of the printing press was addressed by books. People upset by the emergence of writing wrote about their concerns.

Every transformation of technology distances us initially from one another but simultaneously provides the means for connecting with one another on deeper levels than ever before.

So we need to learn new behaviors to live in a new world. That is much more difficult than understanding why new behaviors are necessary.

I know a teacher of ten-year-olds who was told to teach them how to use computers but didn't know how to turn them on. She asked her students, "Who knows how?" Hands waved in the air. She turned the task over to one and hid behind her desk.

But she couldn't hide forever. So one day she asked her three brightest children to teach her how to do it.

She had the courage to form an alliance with her students -- hardly a traditional route for teachers to take. Once again, building a structure for mutuality, feedback, and accountability provided what was needed.

Managers, teachers -- even parents -- must form unorthodox alliances and learn from those they used to teach. The wisdom of experience is still valuable and relevant, but in a different way. The command-and-control behaviors learned in a hierarchical structure do not make for good coaches.

Good coaches know how to be present but not controlling, available but not directive. Like the best computer assisted learning, good coaches provide information not at the convenience of the curriculum but when learners are most teachable.

Individuals and organizations intending to survive into the 21st century must build in an openness to heresy. The creativity, fresh insight, and wisdom we need will always come as a surprise from the boundaries of our lives. But that it emerges and can be captured and put to use will not be a surprise to those who learn to live at the center of the Web.

1996

BACK