SEARCHING UPSTREAM

It is no small irony that my defection from the establishment resulted from my application of a rule of effective problem solving that I was taught at the Stanford Business School. Our professors constantly admonished us to, “Look at the big picture,” by which they meant, treat the visible problem—a defective product or under performing employee—as a symptom of a deeper system failure. “Find the root cause and focus your attention on fixing the system.” Next to reading and typing it is perhaps the most important thing I learned in more than 26 years of formal education. My professors were applying the principle within the confines of the business enterprise. I ended up applying it beyond the firm in a search for an answer to the question, "What is the underlying cause of the unfolding social and environmental collapse that threatens the human future?"

It's About "Why?"

Years later, a wise Canadian friend and colleague, Tim Brodhead, reminded me of this lesson when he explained why most efforts to end poverty fail. “They stop at treating the symptoms of poverty, such as hunger and poor health, with food programs and clinics without ever asking the obvious question:  'Why do a few people enjoy effortless abundance, while billions of others who work far harder experience extreme deprivation?’” The lesson, as he summed it up, is “If you act to correct a problem without a theory about its cause, you inevitably treat only the symptoms.”  It is the same lesson my business professors had stressed years earlier. Over time I came to apply it to a much larger context than what they probably had in mind.  

Worse than No Theory

What my wise colleague did not mention is that placing too much faith in a bad theory or story, one that offers incorrect explanations, may be worse than acting with no theory at all because we risk amplifying the actions that caused the problem in the first place. Indeed, a bad theory/story can lead whole societies to persist in self-destructive behavior to the point of self-extinction.

Jared Diamond tells of the Viking colony on the coast of Greenland next to waters abundant with fish that perished because of a cultural theory or story that eating fish is not “civilized.” On a much larger scale, the human future is now in question and the cause can be traced to stories that serve the narrow interests of a few at the risk of devastating consequences for all

Need for New Cultural Stories

A theory, of course, is nothing more than a fancy name for a story that offers an explanation of how things work.It is now common knowledge that we humans are on a suicidal course to self-destruction. Climate chaos, rising oil prices, collapsing fisheries, dead rivers, falling water tables, terrorism, genocidal wars, financial collapse, lead tainted children's toys, species extinction, 30,000 child deaths daily from poverty, and millions squeezed out of the middle class in a growing economy in the richest country in the world are all evidence of the monumental failure of our existing cultural stories and the institutions to which they give rise. We have good reason to fear for our future.

At first, each of the many disasters that confront us appears distinct. In fact, they all have a common origin that our feeble “solutions” fail to address for lack of an adequate theory. The Great Turning is the big picture story or theory of where we went wrong and what we can do about it.