[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
The Year 2000: Social Chaos or Social Transformation? (Part 2)
How might we respond?
As individuals, nations, and as a global society, do we have a
choice as to how we might respond to Y2K, however problems
materialize? The question of alternative social responses lies at
the outer edges of the interlocking circles of technology and
system relationships. At present, potential societal reactions
receive almost no attention. But we firmly believe that it is the
central most important place to focus public attention and
individual ingenuity. Y2K is a technology-induced problem, but it
will not and cannot be solved by technology. It creates societal
problems that can only be solved by humans. We must begin
to address potential social responses. We need to be engaged in this
discourse within our organizations, our communities,
and across the traditional boundaries of competition and national
borders. Without such planning, we will slide into the Year
2000 as hapless victims of our technology.
Even where there is some recognition of the potential disruptions or
chaos that Y2K might create, there's a powerful dynamic
of secrecy preventing us from engaging in these conversations.
Leaders don't want to panic their citizens. Employees don't
want to panic their bosses. Corporations don't want to panic
investors. Lawyers don't want their clients to confess to anything.
But as psychotherapist and information systems consultant Dr.
Douglass Carmichael has written:
Those who want to hush the problem ("Don't talk about it,
people will panic", and "We don't know for sure.")
are having three effects. First, they are preventing a more
rigorous investigation of the extent of the problem.
Second, they are slowing down the awareness of the intensity of
the problem as currently understood and the
urgency of the need for solutions, given the current assessment
of the risks. Third, they are making almost
certain a higher degree of ultimate panic, in anger, under
conditions of shock.15
Haven't we yet learned the consequences of secrecy? When people are
kept in the dark, or fed misleading information, their
confidence in leaders quickly erodes. In the absence of real
information, people fill the information vacuum with rumors and
fear. And whenever we feel excluded, we have no choice but to
withdraw and focus on self-protective measures. As the veil of
secrecy thickens, the capacity for public discourse and shared
participation in solution-finding disappears. People no longer
believe anything or anybody�we become unavailable, distrusting and
focused only on self-preservation. Our history with the
problems created by secrecy has led CEO Norman Augustine to advise
leaders in crisis to: "Tell the truth and tell it fast."16
Behaviors induced by secrecy are not the only human responses
available. Time and again we observe a much more positive
human response during times of crisis. When an earthquake strikes,
or a bomb goes off, or a flood or fire destroys a
community, people respond with astonishing capacity and
effectiveness. They use any available materials to save and rescue,
they perform acts of pure altruism, they open their homes to one
another, they finally learn who their neighbors are. We've
interviewed many people who participated in the aftermath of a
disaster, and as they report on their experiences, it is clear
that their participation changed their lives. They discovered new
capacities in themselves and in their communities. They
exceeded all expectations. They were surrounded by feats of caring
and courage. They contributed to getting systems restored
with a speed that defied all estimates.
When chaos strikes, there's simply no time for secrecy; leaders have
no choice but to engage every willing soul. And the field
for improvisation is wide open�no emergency preparedness drill ever
prepares people for what they actually end up doing.
Individual initiative and involvement are essential. Yet
surprisingly, in the midst of conditions of devastation and fear, people
report how good they feel about themselves and their colleagues.
These crisis experiences are memorable because the best of
us becomes visible and available. We've observed this in America,
and in Bangladesh, where the poorest of the poor
responded to the needs of their most destitute neighbors rather than
accepting relief for themselves.
What we know about people in crisis
shared purpose and meaning brings people together
people display unparalleled levels of creativity and
resourcefulness
people want to help others - individual agendas fade
immediately
people learn instantly and respond at lightning speed
the more information people get, the smarter their responses
leadership behaviors (not roles) appear everywhere, as needed
people experiment constantly to find what works
Who might we become?
As we sit staring into the unknown dimensions of a global crisis
whose timing is non-negotiable, what responses are available
to us as a human community? An effective way to explore this
question is to develop potential scenarios of possible social
behaviors. Scenario planning is an increasingly accepted technique
for identifying the spectrum of possible futures that are
most important to an organization or society. In selecting among
many possible futures, it is most useful to look at those that
account for the greatest uncertainty and the greatest impact. For
Y2K, David Isenberg, (a former AT&T telecommunications
expert, now at Isen.Com) has identified the two variables which seem
obvious � the range of technical failures from isolated to
multiple, and the potential social responses, from chaos to
coherence. Both variables are critical and uncertain and are
arrayed as a pair of crossing axes, as shown in Figure 2. When
displayed in this way, four different general futures emerge.
In the upper left quadrant, if technical failures are isolated and
society doesn't respond to those, nothing of significance will
happen. Isenberg labels this the "Official Future" because it
reflects present behavior on the part of leaders and
organizations.
Figure 2.
The upper right quadrant describes a time where technical failures
are still isolated, but the public responds to these with
panic, perhaps fanned by the media or by stonewalling leaders.
Termed "A Whiff of Smoke," the situation is analogous to the
panic caused in a theater by someone who smells smoke and spreads an
alarm, even though it is discovered that there is no
fire. This world could evolve from a press report that fans the
flames of panic over what starts as a minor credit card glitch
(for example), and, fueled by rumors turns nothing into a major
social problem with runs on banks, etc.
The lower quadrants describe far more negative scenarios.
"Millennial Apocalypse" presumes large-scale technical failure
coupled with social breakdown as the organizational, political and
economic systems come apart. The lower left quadrant,
"Human Spirit" posits a society that, in the face of clear
adversity, calls on each of us to collaborate in solving the problems of
breakdown.
Since essentially we are out of time and resources for preventing
widespread Y2K failures, a growing number of observers
believe that the only plausible future scenarios worth contemplating
are those in the lower half of the matrix. The major
question before us is how will society respond to what is almost
certain to be widespread and cascading technological
failures?
Figure 3.
Figure 3 above shows a possible natural evolution of the problem.
Early, perhaps even in '98, the press could start something
bad long before it was clear how serious the problem was and how
society would react to it. There could be an interim scenario
where a serious technical problem turned into a major social problem
from lack of adaquate positive social response. This
"Small Theatre Fire" future could be the kind of situation where
people overreact and trample themselves trying to get to the
exits from a small fire that is routinely extinguished.
If the technical situation is bad, a somewhat more ominous situation
could evolve where government, exerting no clear positive
leadership and seeing no alternative to chaos, cracks down so as not
to lose control (A common historical response to social
chaos has been for the government to intervene in non-democratic,
sometimes brutal fashion. "Techno-fascism" is a plausible
scenario -- governments and large corporations would intervene to
try to contain the damage -- rather than build for the
future. This dictatorial approach would be accompanied by secrecy
about the real extent of the problem and ultimately fueled
by the cries of distress, prior to 2000, from a society that has
realized its major systems are about to fail and that it is too late
to do anything about it.
Collaboration is our only choice
Obviously, the scenario worth working towards is "Human Spirit," a
world where the best of human creativity is enabled and
the highest common good becomes the objective. In this world we all
work together, developing a very broad, powerful,
synergistic, self-organizing force focused on determining what
humanity should be doing in the next 18 months to plan for
the aftermath of the down stroke of Y2K. This requires that we
understand Y2K not as a technical problem, but as a systemic,
worldwide event that can only be resolved by new social
relationships. All of us need to become very wise and very engaged
very fast and develop entirely new processes for working together.
Systems issues cannot be resolved by hiding behind
traditional boundaries or by clinging to competitive strategies.
Systems require collaboration and the dissolution of existing
boundaries. Our only hope for healthy responses to Y2K-induced
failures is to participate together in new collaborative
relationships.
At present, individuals and organizations are being encouraged to
protect themselves, to focus on solving "their" problem. In
a system's world, this is insane. The problems are not isolated,
therefore no isolated responses will work. The longer we
pursue strategies for individual survival, the less time we have to
create any viable, systemic solutions. None of the
boundaries we've created across industries, organizations,
communities, or nation states give us any protection in the face of
Y2K. We must stop the messages of fragmentation now and focus
resources and leadership on figuring out how to engage
everyone, at all levels, in all systems.
As threatening as Y2K is, it also gives us the unparalleled
opportunity to figure out new and simplified ways of working
together. GM's chief information officer, Ralph Szygenda, has said
that Y2K is the cruelest trick ever played on us by
technology, but that it also represents a great opportunity for
change.17 It demands that we let go of traditional boundaries
and roles in the pursuit of new, streamlined systems, ones that are
less complex than the entangled ones that have evolved over
the past thirty years.
There's an interesting lesson here about involvement that comes from
the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Just a few weeks
prior the bombing, agencies from all over the city conducted an
emergency preparedness drill as part of normal civil defense
practice. They did not prepare themselves for a bomb blast, but they
did work together on other disaster scenarios. The most
significant accomplishment of the drill was to create an invisible
infrastructure of trusting relationships. When the bomb
went off, that infrastructure displayed itself as an essential
resource--people could work together easily, even in the face of
horror. Many lives were saved and systems were restored at an
unprecedented rate because people from all over the
community worked together so well.
But there's more to this story. One significant player had been
excluded from the preparedness drill, and that was the FBI. No
one thought they'd ever be involved in a Federal matter. To this
day, people in Oklahoma City speak resentfully of the manner
in which the FBI came in, pushed them aside, and offered no
explanations for their behavior. In the absence of trusting
relationships, some form of techno-fascism is the only recourse.
Elizabeth Dole, as president of the American Red Cross
commented: "The midst of a disaster is the poorest possible time to
establish new relationships and to introduce ourselves to
new organizations . . . . When you have taken the time to build
rapport, then you can make a call at 2 a.m., when the river's
rising and expect to launch a well-planned, smoothly conducted
response."18
The scenario of communities and organizations working together in
new ways demands a very different and immediate
response not only from leaders but from each of us. We'd like to
describe a number of actions that need to begin immediately.
What leaders must do
We urge leaders to give up trying to carry this burden alone, or
trying to reestablish a world that is irretrievably broken. We
need leaders to be catalysts for the emergence of a new world. They
cannot lead us through this in traditional ways. No leader
or senior team can determine what needs to be done. No single group
can assess the complexity of these systems and where
the consequences of failure might be felt. The unknown but complex
implications of Y2K demand that leaders support
unparalleled levels of participation�more broad-based and inclusive
than ever imagined. If we are to go through this crisis
together rather than bunkered down and focused only on individual
security, leaders must begin right now to convene us.
The first work of leaders then, is to create the resources for
groups to come together in conversations that will reveal the
interconnections. Boundaries need to dissolve. Hierarchies are
irrelevant. Courageous leaders will understand that they
must surrender the illusion of control and seek solutions from the
great networks and communities within their domain.
They must move past the dynamics of competition and support us in
developing society-wide solutions.
Leaders can encourage us to seek out those we have excluded and
insist that they be invited in to all deliberations. Leaders
can provide the time and resources for people to assess what is
critical for the organization or community to sustain�its
mission, its functions, its relationships, its unique qualities.
>From these conversations and plans, we will learn to know one
another and to know what we value. In sudden crises, people
instantly share a sense of meaning and purpose. For Y2K, we have
at least a little lead time to develop a cohesive sense of what
might happen and how we hope to respond.
Secrecy must be replaced by full and frequent disclosure of
information. The only way to prevent driving people into isolated
and self-preserving behaviors is to entrust us with difficult, even
fearsome information, and then to insist that we work
together.
No leader anywhere can ignore these needs or delay their
implementation.
What communities must do
Communities need to assess where they are most vulnerable and
develop contingency plans. Such assessment and planning
needs to occur not just within individual locales, but also in
geographic regions. These activities can be initiated by existing
community networks, for example, civic organizations such as Lions
or Rotary, Council of Churches, Chamber of Commerce,
the United Way. But new and expansive alliances are required, so
planning activities need quickly to extend beyond traditional
borders. We envision residents of all ages and experience coming
together to do these audits and planning. Within each
community and region, assessments and contingency plans need to be
in place for disruptions or loss of service for:
all utilities
electricity, water, gas, phones
food supplies
public safety
healthcare
government payments to individuals and organizations
residents most at risk, e.g. the elderly, those requiring
medications
What organizations must do
Organizations need to move Y2K from the domain of technology experts
into the entire organization. Everyone in the
organization has something important to contribute to this work.
Assessment and contingency plans need to focus on:
how the organization will perform essential tasks in the
absence of present systems
how the organization will respond to failures or slowdowns in
information and supplies
what simplified systems can be developed now to replace
existing ones
relationships with suppliers, customers, clients,
communities�how we will work together
developing systems to ensure open and full access to
information
The trust and loyalty developed through these strategic
conversations and joint planning will pay enormous dividends later on,
even if projected breakdowns don't materialize. Corporate and
community experience with scenario planning has taught a
important principle: We don't need to be able to predict the future
in order to be well-prepared for it. In developing scenarios,
information is sought from all over. People think together about its
implications and thus become smarter as individuals and
as teams. Whatever future then materializes is dealt with by people
who are more intelligent and who know how to work well
together.
And such planning needs to occur at the level of entire industries.
Strained relationships engendered by competitive
pressures need to be put aside so that people can collaboratively
search for ways to sustain the very fabric of their industry.
How will power grids be maintained nationally? Or national systems
of food transport? How will supply chains for
manufacturing in any industry be sustained?
What you can do
We urge you to get involved in Y2K, wherever you are, and in
whatever organizations you participate. We can't leave this
issue to others to solve for us, nor can we wait for anyone else to
assert leadership. You can begin to ask questions; you can
begin to convene groups of interested friends and colleagues; you
can engage local and business leaders; you can educate
yourself and others (start with www.Year2000.com and www.Y2K.com for
up-to-date information and resources.) This is our
problem. And as an African proverb reminds us, if you think you're
too small to make a difference, try going to bed with a
mosquito in the room.
The crisis is now
There is no time left to waste. Every week decreases our options. At
the mid-May meeting of leaders from the G8, a
communiqu� was issued that expressed their shared sensitivity to the
"vast implications" of Y2K, particularly in "defense,
transport, telecommunications, financial services, energy, and
environmental sectors," and the interdependencies among
these sectors. (Strangely, their list excludes from concern
government systems, manufacturing and distribution systems.)
They vowed to "take further urgent action" and to work with one
another, and relevant organizations and agencies. But no
budget was established, and no specific activities were announced.
Such behavior�the issuing of a communiqu�, the promises
of collaboration and further investigation�are all too common in our
late 20th century political landscape.
But the earth continues to circle the sun, and the calendar
relentlessly progresses toward the Year 2000. If we cannot
immediately change from rhetoric to action, from politics to
participation, if we do not immediately turn to one another and
work together for the common good, we will stand fearfully in that
new dawn and suffer consequences that might well have
been avoided if we had learned to stand together now.
Copyright 1998 John L. Petersen, Margaret Wheatley, Myron Kellner-Rogers
(posted with permission)
John L. Petersen is president of The Arlington Institute, a
Washington DC area research institute. He is a futurist who
specializes in thinking about the long range security implications
of global change. He is author of the award winning book,
The Road to 2015: Profiles of the Future and his latest book is Out
of the Blue - Wild Cards and Other Big Future Surprises,
which deals with potential events such as Y2K. He can be reached at
703-243-7070 or [email protected]
Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers are authors and
consultants to business. A Simpler Way, their book on
organizational design was published in 1997. Dr. Wheatley's previous
book, Leadership & the New Science, was recently
named one of the 10 best management books ever, and it also was
voted best management book in 1992 in Industry Week, and
again in 1995 by a syndicated management columnist. Their consulting
work takes them these days to Brazil, Mexico, South
Africa, Australasia and Europe. In the States, they've worked with a
very wide array of organizations.
1 See Peter de Jager, www.year2000.com
2 United Airlines, Flight Talk Network, February 1998
3 "Slow Knowledge," _______1997.
4 See "The Complexity Factor" by Ed Meagher at
www.year2000.com/archive/NFcomplexity.html
5 "Industry Wakes Up to the Year 2000 Menace," Fortune, April 27, 1998
6 The Washington Post, "If Computer Geeks Desert, IRS Codes Will Be
ciphers," December 24, 1997
7 Business Week, March 2, 1998
8 www.igs.net/~tonyc/y2kbusweek.html
9 "Industry Gridlock," Rick Cowles, February 27, 1998,
www.y2ktimebomb.com/PP/RC/rc9808.htm
10 Cowles, January 23, 1998, ibid www site
11 The Complexity Factor, Ed Meagher
12 www.computerweekly.co.uk/news/ll_9_97
13 REUTER "CIA:Year 2000 to hit basic services: Agency warns that many
nations aren't ready for disruption," Jim Wolf, May 7, 1998
14 see http://www.Yardeni.com
15 www.tmn.com/~doug
16 "Managing the Crisis You Tried to Prevent," Harvard Business Review,
Nov-Dec. 1995, 158.
17 In Fortune, April 27, 1998
18 quoted in "Managing the Crisis You Tried to Prevent," Norman
Augustine, Harvard Business Review, Nov-Dec 1995, 151.
To WFS Home
<http://www.wfs.org/year2k.htm>