I woke up this morning and made my way out the front door to pick up the daily newspaper on my driveway. Near my front gate, an Orb spider was weaving a wonderfully symmetrical web across my path. I stopped for a while to watch it at work. After spinning a run, it would laboriously ascend to a perch on a thread of its own construction and then, in a series of acrobatic drops, sweep a new strand of silk along the arc of its emerging work of functional art. After a few minutes, I grabbed a stick and swept away the web that was blocking my path to the newspaper. The spider dropped, then swung away in the breeze. I proceeded along my way, confident in the knowledge that the spider would begin building its web anew, and hopeful that it would choose a new location that would no longer block my path to news of the day.
"Oh what a tangled web we weave." (Click to visit site with web construction video)
What causes the spider to weave its webs? Does it require some special motivation? Does the spider anticipate some future gain? Does it weave its web out of some fear of future dangers? These questions are silly. The spider weaves webs because spiders and their web-weaving physiology and behavior have come into being over the eons through a process of natural selection. Spiders weave webs because their webs have worked over the ages of spiders becoming spiders.
I have described human beings as first and foremost, enterprising creatures who swim upstream against the tides of entropy with aims and intentions that can be powerfully harnessed using aiming and the definition of mission. Our enterprising nature is why we weave our webs, not out of spider silk, but out of symbols that become woven into an ever-emerging web of knowledge. To be human is to laboriously expend energy to ascend from the unpredictable chaos of the world toward a more predictable, orderly, and valuable world of our own creation.
Like the spider at my front gate, humans need no special motivational gimmicks to cause them to be enterprising creators of knowledge. They will do this for no other reason than the fact that they are human. But unlike the spider’s web, the shape of which is determined genetically, the shape of the human web of knowledge is constantly emerging in response to the world “out their” and the “symbolic interactions” between people as they collaborate in the creation of a web of worldly order. An explanation of how this happens is called a “theory of knowledge” or better yet, a “theory of knowledge creation”.
The failure to understand the human predilection for knowledge creation lies at the heart of the most crushing problems of human enterprise in today’s world. What I am saying, is that our failure to develop knowledge about knowing, is getting downright dangerous.
How Useful Fear is Transformed into Paralyzing Terror
Fear is an instinctual and reflexive response to threatening situations. The physiology of fear that pumps adrenaline into our veins is programmed into our genes and it is not hard for us to rationalize why the process of natural selection has favored the fear response. In the business of living, their are situations in which the delay that would come between situations of real danger and our knowing contemplation of the idea of danger, would be too long. Fear that intercedes between danger and our knowing of danger can be a very useful thing. It can cause us to grab on tight when we sense an imminent fall, or run from a threat, or turn to fight when fighting is they only option left to us. But what happens when fear is no longer a pre-knowing process? What happens when we ensconce fear as part of the fabric of our web of knowing?
TERROR: 'The Scream' by Edvard Munch
When fear goes beyond its usefulness as an unreasoned response to immediate threat and becomes a part of our web of knowing, it is transformed into an instrument of knowing by which we order the world. When fear is an instrument, we begin to say, “you should be afraid”, and this can be useful. Our knowing of fear allows us to say to our children for example, these are situations we can imagine, in which you should be fearful. It also opens the door to a Pandoras Box of needless fear. Fear that has its basis only our web of knowing transforms the useful fear reflex into a sustained terror that comes to inhabit our minds and souls. And terror that causes us to live in perpetual recoil and cower, destroys our enterprising selves.
In Western enterprise, our failure to understand the nature of knowing has created a reign of terror. It begins in our system for educating our young (and maybe even sooner). In that system, we teach our children well, that their teachers and parents will judge them harshly against one another. By some measure (by what measure>), some will be judged “winners”, while most must be less than winners. Some will be judged failures.
We act with systematic purpose to create a web of knowing in which the terror of the judgement of others becomes deeply engrained in our knowing. The enterprising spirit that comes as naturally as the spider’s constructing of its web, is transformed into a gripping, fleeing, fighting, response that dominates our children’s waking actions and their dreams at night. The way in which our children cope with their lives lived in terror are predictable enough. Some collapse in hopeless despair. Many lay low, hoping to go unnoticed by their tormentors. Some become ruthless aggressors, who in terror, act as manipulative terrorists in their own right.
Terror-free system of enterprise
The participants in your enterprise come to you with the baggage acquired from a lifetime of living in terror. Their ability to ascend in the enterprise of creating new knowledge has been quashed by unrelenting fear. There is no such thing as “unlearning”. You cannot erase their stories. You cannot “fix” them any more than you can “fix” yourself. What you can do is stop the process of creating terror. Bring people together. Define the mission of your enterprise. Take aim. Put everyone to work to create and improve the system. Free them from the terror the keeps them looking over the shoulder for ghostly shades that threaten their destruction. With eyes front, lead people to move continually forward with with the unrelenting intention to create ever-greater value.
This will be enough.
Dr. W. E. Deming understood how terror destroys the ability of an enterprise to move forward. (from his 14 Points)
8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.
9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team to foresee problems of production in use that may be encountered with the product or services.
10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity.
11a. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor; substitute leadership.
11b. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.
12a. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride in workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.
12b. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective, management by the numbers.
14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody’s job.
