We've Boxed Ourselves In
The world seems especially turbulent and uncertain right now. Some writers call this the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Others call it the Age of Uncertainty. For this post, I’ll call it the Era of Deconstructing the Boxes.
We’ve seen massive upheaval before. Prior to the First Industrial Revolution in Britain, life was organized into rural, self-sufficient agricultural or artisanal households. Then the sources of muscle and energy shifted, from human hands and naturals resources to machines and fossil fuels. Work moved to manufacturing centers, smelting factories and mines, often far from home.
Society wasn’t prepared. Civilization based on land wealth and agriculture had lasted 5,000 years. There was nothing in the memory banks to imagine the magnitude or speed of change being thrust onto society; there was no infrastructure to do anything about it. Inequity, exploitation and suffering resulted. Families followed work into urban areas, which became riddled with overcrowded, disease-ridden housing situated in horribly polluted environments. Labor exploitation was the norm (especially of children and women) and the terrible working conditions created new occupational hazards such as lung disease and bone deformities. The death rate rose; infant mortality was very high; disease struck—tuberculosis, typhus, and cholera.
We brought stability and order to this new world of large-scale machinery, organization, and capital by sorting everything and everyone into boxes. New hierarchical management systems were developed to organize large production systems. New social and economic structures, such as labor laws, unions and pensions arose to combat the inequities. New governance structures emerged to manage urban conditions. Even the notion of time changed. Peasants’ time had been dictated by the seasons and daylight, not clocks. Strict time management—yet another box—was (and remains) an instrument of the new management systems.
As complexity increased, everything was institutionalized and professionalized, each bound tightly with hierarchy and rules. And then, when the silos became too rigid and the boxes too many, our response was to jumble smaller boxes together into a giant box, like Homeland Security.
What we’re seeing today is a bursting out of the boxes. These boxes were built for stable, ordered, repetitive processes, like manufacturing. Efficiency and order are important, but they sacrifice inclusion and diversity and caring, and with that, the ability to solve complex problems. Let’s look at a few examples.
The protocol box. Last year Minneapolis opened its waiting list for housing (Section 8) vouchers—a highly ordered process. The application period was open for one week—after the list had been closed for 10 years. Two thousand people were put on a waiting list for a housing voucher out of 14,000 people who applied. Half of applicants were families and 80% were people of color (Minnesota is 83% white). Because the list was opened at the same time as two other metro-area lists, it was hailed as “a great opportunity for regional collaboration.”
The standardization box. In K-12 education, we spout “no child left behind.” Yet we teach to the test, rather than to learn. The high school graduation rate for Black males in the U.S. is around 60%. So right now, it’s more like ‘some children left behind.’
The fraternity box. We professionalize ourselves into groupthink, another aspect that fortifies the walls of the box. Follow the rise of professional police, from morality monitors in the north and slave patrols in the south, for an example of how the professionalism box became an apparatus of repression and racial othering.
As we know from complexity theory, real life has nothing to do with independent, sealed-off boxes. Everything is related. The problems of society emerge from nonlinear, multidirectional factors, entangled in a continuous interactive play-by-play.
Our answer thus far, in the form of “breaking down silos,” is collaboration. Collaboration is important; many benefits accrue from collaboration. But note that collaboration is an exchange between boxes, not stepping away from a box structure itself. And a box can be more than an organizational structure, as the examples above show. They can be procedures, metrics, norms, budgets, schedules.
Another common answer to complex problems is “more money.” We tend to pour money into the same rigid boxes and then wonder why the expected results didn’t materialize, whether it is spending on the police, K-12 education or housing. Money is highly boxified through protocols, privilege, laws and regulations, and mindsets. I will devote an entire blog post to it.
Our means of production are changing once again, from machinery to AI and biotechnology. The boxes have to be deconstructed, or at least become far more permeable and shapeshifting. It is possible; our youngest generation already functions this way. Last week, teenagers used Tik-Tok to reserve tickets to President Trump’s recent rally with the intention of not showing, causing it to be grossly under-attended. There was no box or rules or hierarchy to this action. It was a self-organizing network. Just as there is no box that contains a protest movement.
In his book “Future-Ready Leadership, Strategies for the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” author Chris Groscurth writes, “After 20 years…experience helping leaders prepare for and implement change, I am 100 percent certain that the people who lead our governments, institutions, organizations and businesses are not ready for the journey we’re embarking on.” Yikes!
How does one prepare for an unknowable future? We can start by focusing on what we do know, and making sense of that. If our current structures are not serving us because they were born of a different era, what do we want to keep and what should we shed? Which boxes constrict us the most and are those constraints serving us well? If not, how can we start to take apart the box, remembering as always that the future is made by the actions we take in the present moment.
What does breaking-down the box look like for you? I recently worked in philanthropy, so I’ll offer some possibilities in next week’s post using philanthropy as an example. But as always, I am eager to hear your thoughts.
note: there will be no Saturday post this week
photo credit: Emily Morter, https://stocksnap.io/photo/light-longexposure-KV6IATK4SM