Reflections On Current Decision-Making

After twenty years of being in the management consulting business and meeting with many of the World’s leaders and senior managers in government, public institutions, academia and large multinational companies, I have seen the unfolding of far too many negative scenarios on a global scale.  Though many wonderful decision thinking, planning and learning tools, methods and thoughtful facilitators in areas such as System Thinking, Scenario Planning and Causal Texture Profiling, including Goal Oriented Problem Solving, have remained available, the perception and understanding of the benefits of such things has been rapidly degenerating.  A new brutality, lead and enforced by New World Order politicians in America , Britain , Europe and Israel , has deliberately fostered a dumbing down of managers in both government and business.  The ugly stupidity and corruption built-in to Privatization, which reduces business competition and the need for competent strategic planning, is reducing managers to mere bureaucratic cogs in an increasingly mindless machine of economic self-destruction.  Lethal outsourcing of manufacturing from the West to the East insures less and less desire or inclination for organizational learning or improvement of decision thinking in the West.  There is also a dumbing down in education in the West, which, coupled with the decline of competent decision thinking and strategic planning, heralds nothing less than the imminent collapse of Western Civilization.

Fewer and fewer companies are willing to invest in organizational learning or better decision making.  The big corrupt and politically nasty management consultancies are increasingly absorbing or driving out the more competent and thoughtful smaller consultancies who see more or less what is really going on.  There is less and less of a market for enhanced facilitation of better group decision-making.  Real awareness, thought and learning have become a negative growth industry.  I myself have had to notice that the greater my own thinking and planning skills have grown over the years, the lesser the demand for my services.  I have become overqualified for helping government and business come to improved decision-making.  It is clear to me (and others like me) that decision-making on the planet Earth wants to get worse.

Any thoughtful person who cannot see the obvious degeneration of decision-making in the World is not actually thoughtful at all.  Not only are the stupid masses in America , Britain , Europe and Israel growing stupider, but so are their leaders.  A multiple Nero is fiddling while a multiple Rome burns.  Instead of wanting to sincerely solve World Problems, they are promoting disease, death and destruction with demonic, short-sighted zeal and stealth.  Those who ‘tell it like it is’, such as Hugo Chavez of Venezuela , are ridiculed and ignored by those who should be listening and learning.

There is no point in describing the intricacies and fine-points of Group Visual Facilitation Decision Thinking to stupid, arrogant, incompetent and wrongly motivated senior managers in multinational companies, for instance.  Twenty years ago, one in ten could grasp and appreciate such urgently important decision thinking tools and techniques.  Today, only one in twenty-five will partially listen and comprehend.  Organizational Learning is increasingly a politically hijacked slogan rather than a shared leadership dynamic, if it is acknowledged at all.  Real thinking and learning in management circles in any form whatsoever are treated as if they are an irrelevant old “Management Fad”, when nothing could be farther from the truth. Ignorant hubris cannot see past its growing Pinocchio Nose of political and economic lying and manipulation.

     Listen to what Arie de Geus pointed out in his book, The Living Company (Nicholas Brealey, 1997):

 “Today I recognize that the economic company is an abstraction with little to do with the reality of corporate life.  Not only does labour not equate to people, but the emphasis on profits and the maximization of shareholder value ignores the two most significant forces acting on companies today: the shift to knowledge and the changing world environment.  Companies could act according to the economic definition of success when managers felt that they were in control of their world.  But rare is the manager who feels in control of today’s turbulent environment.  Therefore, to cope with a changing world, any entity must develop the capability to shift and change, to develop new skills and attitudes:  in short, the capability to learn.”

In my own personal discussions with Arie de Geus, I still recollect his hammering me with the fact that the really huge multinational companies like Shell, are not strategic, economic entities, but a way of life for thousands of managers and workers.  In the light of present trends, plus his liking of the biological system theories of Francisco Varela, I would have to say that what Arie called Institutional Learning is now being treated by governments and multinational companies as an invasive germ that triggers an auto-immune response.  The white blood cells form a containing sac of pus around any valid introduction of genuine Decision Thinking and Learning into the organization.  Any group of ostensible planners in an organization who become too enthusiastic about the Real Thing will be treated as “politically incorrect” and find budgets withheld from on high for any constructive management programs for improving decision-making and coming to terms with deeply urgent scenarios of the future.  My own management consultancy has increasingly suffered this “immune response” over the years, which even happened to us at Shell after the retirement of Arie de Geus, the Planning Coordinator.  The more significant and potent the things we would introduce into Shell and other large organizations, the more rapidly our star would rise, but the more rapidly we would be suppressed and rejected from on high for helping out too effectively.  Think about it.

Where does the Facilitation of Organizational Learning go from here?  Perhaps the problem was most acutely diagnosed by Robert Anton Wilson in his book, Prometheus Rising (Falcon Press, 1990):

 “Any attempt to preach tolerance, common humanity, relativism, etc. is not processed through the semantic circuit, but through the emotional circuit, and is rejected as an attack on status (ego, social role).  Of course, preaching itself is bad second circuit politics, since it puts you one-up on the person preached-at.  You are not one-up unless imprinted as such by an alpha male in the same gene-pool or conditioned as such by being a “boss” or other authority figure.  The counter-culture of the 1960’s, like many other idealistic movements, failed because it did so much preaching from a morally one-up position when nobody had been imprinted or conditioned to accept it as one-up.”

Within the present collapsing Western Civilization, it is the stupid and vicious Decision Makers who control the Mass Media and public institutions, enabling them to use vote-rigging, propaganda, misinformation and psy-ops to condition and program the stupid masses to support or tolerate clearly bad decisions on both national and global scales.      When the Alternative Media on the Internet preach against all that misgovernance and bad decision-making, they are, unfortunately, on the same footing as Hippy leaders in the 1960’s.  The slightly thoughtful 33.3% minority in America , who can see, for instance, that 911 was an inside job, can only ineffectually preach to the thoughtless 66.6% majority in America who continue to believe Osama Bin Laden did it.  The thoughtless majority, programmed by the Neocons, are the sheep being run over the cliff by their black shepherds, threatening to take the slightly more thoughtful minority with them.  This pattern is repeated in every nation and organization on Earth. 

The first thing all advocates of Organizational Learning have to learn now is why such Organizational Learning is happening less rather than more.  The Ecosystem of Humanity and the Natural Environment today is not viable as described by Stafford Beer.  The planet Earth desperately needs a Viable System Model that would be understood and embraced by the World’s actual top leaders, but that is not going to happen because of the nature of the World’s actual top leaders, who have forged powerful cabals for global death and destruction.  The tiny minority of top leaders who have tried to point this out are not being heeded by the majority of secretive and wrongly motivated top leaders.  We cannot get better Decision-making in those who are locked into their present stupidity, corruption and evil intentions.  There is no Higher Intelligence or Ethical Conscience in them to receive the message.  They are themselves imprinted and conditioned to their imaginary superiority.  Learning cannot be transmitted to sources of Anti-learning. 

I am myself retired and no longer cultivate the contacts in government and industry that I once cultivated.  However, with retirement, one gains a fresh overview with more time to think about the real meaning of present trends.  The Big Picture requires a Big Awareness, but few people have the time or inclination to develop their awareness, so the real Big Picture remains unseen over some distant horizon.  It is not only that Mankind avoids the truth of itself and its future, but the truth of Mankind and its future also withdraws from Mankind.  Reality itself is retired from the World, which leaves a World of increasing shock and ruin without a viable future.