Meg Wheatley et al on Y2K - Part 2: The Response

[Jeff Aitken]

>Subject: Meg Wheatley et al on Y2K - Part 2: The Response
>
>        This is the second part of the article
>
>        The Year 2000: Social Chaos or Social Transformation?
>
>        by
>
>        John L. Petersen, Margaret Wheatley, Myron Kellner-Rogers
>
>        If you did not receive the first part, request it from the person
>who sent you this.
>
>- - - - - - - -
>
>(continued from Part 1)
>
>
>        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." [http://www.tmn.com/~doug]
>
>        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." ["Managing the Crisis You Tried to
>Prevent,"  Harvard Business Review, Nov-Dec. 1995, 158.]
>
>        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
>
>           o   shared purpose and meaning brings people together
>           o   people display unparalleled levels of creativity
>                     and resourcefulness
>           o   people want to help others - individual agendas fade
>                     immediately
>           o   people learn instantly and respond at lightning speed
>           o   the more information people get, the smarter
>                     their responses
>           o   leadership behaviors (not roles) appear
>                     everywhere, as needed
>           o   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.  When displayed in
>this way, four different general futures emerge.
>
>        (1)  In the upper left quadrant, if technical failures are isolated
>and society doesn't respond to those failures, nothing of significance will
>happen.  Isenberg labels this the "Official Future" because it reflects
>present behavior on the part of leaders and organizations.
>
>        (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.
>
>        (3)  The lower right, "Millennial Apocalypse" presumes large-scale
>technical failure coupled with social breakdown as the organizational,
>political and economic systems come apart.
>
>        (4)  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 (scenarios 3 and 4).  The major question before us is
>how will society respond to what is almost certain to be widespread and
>cascading technological failures?
>
>        Here is one 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 a non-democratic, sometimes brutal fashion.
>In response to Y2K, "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. [In Fortune, April 27, 1998]  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." [quoted in "Managing the Crisis
>You Tried to Prevent,"  Norman Augustine, Harvard Business Review, Nov-Dec
>1995, 151.]
>
>        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
>http://www.Year2000.com and http://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 communique 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 communique,
>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
>
>
>        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 johnp at arlinst.org
>
>        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.
>
>
>