Illuminating The Blind Spot

H E S S E L B E I N

&

C O M P A N Y

the Blind Spot
W. Brian Arthur, Jonathan Day, Joseph Jaworski, Michael Jung, Ikujiro Nonaka, Claus Otto Scharmer, Peter M. Senge
e live, lead, and work in an era of clashing forces. The waves of change sweeping the world—digitization, globalization, demographic shifts, migration, and individualization, as well as the rapid degradation of social andnatural capital—play out as tensions among multiple polarities: speed and sustainability, exploration and exploitation, global and local ways of organizing, top-down and bottom-up approaches to leadership. Although this may have been true at many times and places in human history, there is something different about today’s circumstances. The pace of change is somehow faster, the frequency andamplitude of restructuring and reforming are significantly greater, and the pathways of emerging futures seem to be less predictable than they were in earlier times.

Illuminating

form part of the larger force that will reshape the world. For leaders, what is real has changed. In traditional and more stable business environments, the value chain was based largely on the physical world and itsprocesses. Social relationships and their processes were considered peripheral complications. In today’s organic and dynamic environment,“value constellations” are largely based on intangible resources. This intangible dimension is the domain of human action and relationships. The shift from the tangible to the intangible becomes clear when one understands the informal social networks essential to allwork, the role of mental models, and the emerging patterns of interdependence among complex and highly distributed processes of innovation. Accordingly, in the knowledge economy, measures of soft variables such as intentions, interpretations, and relationships are increasingly considered part of the more concrete and primary sphere of value creation. Hence the core of what is considered real hasmoved from the tangible to the intangible variables of social behavior and managerial action. As management and leadership change their fundamental assumptions about what is real, science is also changing. Complexity theorists

W

W. B. Arthur J. Jaworski

J. Day M. Jung

I. Nonaka C. Scharmer P. Senge

As the economic foundations of our business world are transformed from more stablepatterns to more dynamic patterns, the nature of leader-

ship changes, too. In this environment, real power comes from recognizing the patterns of change. Small differences can cause powerful effects, so the task of a leader is to sense and recognize emerging patterns and get into a position, personally and organizationally, to

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shift our perspective from seeing reality asstatic models and stable patterns to seeing reality as living and evolving systems. According to this view, systems emerge from the bottom up, the parts embody the whole, and relationship patterns evolve. What makes this turn in science relevant to business today is the challenge of coordinating increasingly complex systems. Participants in globally distributed systems find it hard to grasp the bigpicture when the workplace is just a node in a network. Operational excellence, as achieved by Toyota’s famed production system, emerges from evolving patterns of “concrete particulars” rather than from adherence to a rigid management system. In the context of a complex, dynamic system, paradoxically, the individual and the local team become even more important as integrators and coordinators offunctions that used to be taken care of by formal sysI

must develop their cognitive capacity to pay attention to intangible sources of knowledge and knowing within themselves. Study, Practice, and Service

We believe that an important blind
spot in twentieth-century philosophy, social science, and management science lies in not seeing the full process of social reality formation. In dayto-day...