The Age Of Unreason

by Charles Handy

  For those in charge continuity is comfort, and predictability ensures that they can continue in control. Instinctively, therefore, they prefer to believe that things will go on as they have before. It requires, as Mancur Olsen has argued, revolutions to unblock societies and shocks to galvanize organizations. Perhaps that is why Britain, untouched by revolution for over 300 years, seems to prefer that the status quo should be the way forward and why organizations too often learn too late.

  Major change in organizations seems to follow a predictable and sad sequence:

  FRIGHT – the possibility of bankruptcy, takeover or collapse

  NEW FACES – new people are brought in at the top

  NEW QUESTIONS – questions, study groups, investigations into old ways and new options

  NEW STRUCTURES – the existing pattern is broken up and re-arranged to give new talent scope and break up old clubs

  NEW GOALS & STANDARDS – the new organization sets itself new aims and targets.

  Do we always need a painful jolt to start re-thinking? Did it need the Titanic to sink before it became compulsory for ships to carry enough lifeboats for all the passengers? Did the Challenger shuttle have to explode before NASA reorganized its decision-making systems and priorities?

  How many have to die before we make cars safer and less powerful?

  It is the argument of this book that discontinuous change is all around us. We would be foolish to block our eyes to its signs as those Peruvian Indians did to their invaders’ sails. We need not leave it too late, like the frog in boiling water, nor wait for a revolution. There are opportunities as well as problems in discontinuous change. If we change our attitudes, our habits and the ways of some of our institutions it can be an age of new discovery, new enlightenment and new freedoms, an age of true learning.

  Ask people, as I have often done, to recall two or three of the most important learning experiences in their lives and they will never tell you of courses taken or degrees obtained, but of brushes with death, of crises encountered, of new and unexpected challenges or confrontations. They will tell you, in other words, of times when continuity ran out on them, when they had no past experience to fall back on, no rules or handbook. They survived, however, and came to count it as learning, as a growth experience. Discontinuous change, therefore, when properly handled, is the way we grow up.

  The Beginnings Are Small

  We live life on two levels. A teenager in the USA was asked to produce a list of the kinds of critical events which she saw looming in the future. It went like this:

  A US/USSR alliance

  A cancer cure

  Test-tube babies

  An accidental nuclear explosion

  Spread of anarchy throughout the world

  Robots holding political office in the USA

  We could each provide our own such list of triumphs and disasters. When she was asked, however, to list the critical events looming in her personal life she wrote down:

  Moving into my own apartment

  Interior Design School

  Driver’s Licence

  Getting a dog

  Marriage

  Having Children

  Death

  This book is about changes, but it is about the changes which will affect the second list more than the first. Not that a cancer cure or a nuclear war would not have an effect on the way we live our daily lives, but such mega changes belong to other books by other people. This book is written in the belief that it is often the little things in life which change things most and last the longest.

  The chimney, for instance, may have caused more social change than any war. Without a chimney everyone had to huddle together in one central place around a fire with a hole in the roof above. The chimney, with its separate flues, made it possible for one dwelling to heat a variety of rooms. Small units could huddle together independently. The cohesion of the tribe in winter slipped away.

  Central heating – meaning in reality decentralized heating – carried it even further, doing away with fireplaces altogether, making it possible to pile dwelling units on top of dwelling units into the sky and for so many people to live alone, often far above the ground, but warm.

  No one would want to disinvent the chimney or central heating, but their inventors (whose names are long lost if they were ever known) could not have guessed at the changes which they would make to our social architecture. I shall argue in this book, amongst other things, that the telephone line has been and will be the modern day equivalent of the chimney, unintentionally changing the way we work and live.

  I saw a man sitting in his car in the parking place I coveted. ‘Are you about to move?’ I asked. ‘Not for a couple of hours yet,’ he replied. It was then I saw the portable computer on the seat beside him and the fax connected to his car telephone line. He was using his car as a mobile office.

  Rather like central heating, the telephone and its attachments make it possible today for people to work together without being together in one place. The scattered organization is now a reality. The implications, as we shall see, are considerable. It is not an unmixed blessing for being together has always been part of the fun. As Pascal once said, all the world’s ills stem from the fact that a man cannot sit in a room alone. Increasingly, he, and she, may have to.

  Chimneys and telephones are technology – always a potential trigger of discontinuity. Economic reality is another. Governments can stave it off for a while but not forever. In the end countries live or die according to their comparative advantage. Comparative advantage means that there is something for which others will pay a price, be it oil and minerals, cheap labour, golden sun or brains. For Britain and the rest of the industrialized world it has, increasingly, to be brains. Clever people, making clever things or providing clever services add value, sometimes lots of value, to minimal amounts of raw material. Their sales allow the import of all the things we cannot grow and cannot afford to make. That way prosperity advances. It sounds straightforward and simple enough, but its consequences ramble everywhere. Many more clever people are now needed, for one thing, with fewer places for the less clever. Organizations making or doing clever things spend much of their time handling information in all sorts of forms. Facts, figures, words, pictures, ideas, arguments, meetings, committees, papers, conferences all proliferate. Information goes down telephone lines, so technology and economics begin to blend together to create a massive discontinuity in the shape, and skills and purposes of many of our organizations. Clever organizations do not, it seems, work the way organizations used to work, they have different shapes, different working habits, different age profiles, different traditions of authority.

  Barry Jones, now an Australian Cabinet Minister, has listed the typical activities of the information sector.

  teaching creative arts & architecture

  research design

  office work music

  public service data processing

  communications computer software

  the media selling

  films accountancy

  theatre law

  photography psychiatry & psychology

  post & telecommunications social work

  book publishing management

  printing advertising

  banking church

  real estate science

  administration trade unions

  museums & television parliament

  One could add to it: stockbroking, consultancy, journalism, conference organizing, secretarial work, medicine, politics and local government.

  It is unlikely that anyone reading this book will not find his or her work included in this list.

  Technology and economics is a potent blend. It is the premise of this book that from that blend all sorts of changes ensue. Social customs can be transformed. An information society makes it easier for more women to do satisfying jobs. Technology has turned child-bearing into an act of positive decision for most. Marriage then becomes, increasingly,
a public commitment to starting a family. Relationships that do not involve the start of a family no longer need the stamp of public commitment. Women can support themselves and can in theory support a family on their own, and many will prefer to do just that. What was in former times technologically and economically impossible, and therefore socially unacceptable, becomes both possible and acceptable. Discontinuity abroad creeps unnoticed into the family.

  Words are the bugles of social change. When our language changes, behaviour will not be far behind. House-husbands, single-parent families, ‘dinkies’ and ‘telecommuters’, these and many other words were unknown ten years ago. They were not needed. Organizations used to invite men to bring their wives to functions, then it became ‘spouses’ in recognition of the growing number of female employees, then ‘partners’ as an acceptance that marriage is not the only stable relationship, and now in California it is the ‘significant other’ to take care of any conceivable situation.

  Just Think Of It!

  It is the combination of a changing technology and economics, in particular of information technology and biotechnology and the economics associated with them, which causes this discontinuity. Between them they will make the world a different place.

  Information technology links the processing power of the computer with the microwaves, the satellites, and the fibre optic cables of telecommunications. It is a technology which is leaping rather than creeping into the future. It is said that if the automobile industry had developed as rapidly as the processing capacity of the computer we would now be able to buy a 400 mile-per-gallon Rolls-Royce for £1.

  Biotechnology is the completely new industry that has grown out of the interpretation of DNA, the genetic code at the heart of life. It is only one generation old as a science and as an industry, and is only now becoming evident in everyday life with new types of crops, genetic fingerprinting and all the possibilities, good and bad, of what is called bio-engineering.

  These two technologies are developing so fast that their outputs are unpredictable, but some of the more likely developments in the next ten to twenty years could change parts of our lives, and other peoples’ lives, in a dramatic fashion. A group of young executives who were asked by their companies to contemplate 2000 AD came up with the following possibilities and probabilities.

  Cordless telephones Mark 2

  The next generation of cordless telephones may give everyone their own portable personal telephone to be used anywhere at affordable prices. Link it to a lap-top computer and a portable fax and a car or train seat becomes an office. More interestingly, a telephone will then belong to a person not to a place. We will call a person and not know where they are.

  Monoclonal antibodies

  These genetically engineered bacteria which work to prevent particular diseases already exist and will be expanded. Blood-clotting and anti-clotting agents can now be manufactured to prevent major coronary diseases. ‘Scavenger Proteins’ are under investigation, designed to locate undesirable substances in the bloodstream, such as excess cholesterol. Cures for most cancers, and possibly AIDS, will be available by the end of the century. Senile dementia is now understood and drugs to combat it are under development. Life could go on, if not forever, for a lot longer than before when most diseases can be cured or prevented.

  The transgenic pig

  The possibility of using animal organs in humans has been under investigation for some time. The pig is biologically similar to humans and experiments are under way to engineer embryos to produce the transgenic pig, an animal with organs more man-like than piglike. Pig farms may one day mean something quite different from what they do today and replacement organs could be available on demand.

  Water fields

  Crops can now be genetically engineered to grow on poor quality soil or even in water (without tasting like seaweed!). Under development is an idea to engineer crops which can take their nitrogen directly from the air instead of from the ground, reducing the need for fertilizer. Any country could one day grow all the food it needs.

  Enzyme catalysts

  Microbes can now be used as catalysts in many chemical manufacturing processes. Some microbes can even be used to extract minerals from low-grade areas which were previously uneconomic. There are bugs which can be trained to devour and break down waste materials and can even thrive on cyanide. Rubbish disposal is now part of the chemical industry. Indeed, waste can now be converted into methane as one contribution to the energy problem. We shall see, too, self-cleaning ships which will biologically repel barnacles from sticking to their hulls.

  Expert G.P.s

  Computers programmed with up-to-date medical knowledge will be available to all doctors. These medical expert systems will not replace the doctor but will allow every doctor to be a better doctor, to make fewer demands on specialists and so release them to be better specialists. This example of ‘expert systems’ to enhance the work of professionals and technicians will be copied in all types of occupations, from the solicitor’s office to the supermarket purchasing department.

  The hearing computer

  Voice-sensitive computers which can translate the spoken word into written words on a screen will be on every executive’s desk one day, turning everyone into their own typist whether they can use a keyboard or not.

  Irradiated food

  Irradiation, once we are convinced that it is safe, will make it possible to buy ‘fresh’ food from all round the world at any time of the year. There will also be appetite-reducing drugs for those who find the new foods too tempting, and even health-increasing foods for those who want it both ways.

  Telecatalogues

  Teleshopping, already in existence in experimental situations, will one day be commonplace. Every store will display its wares and prices on your home television teletext, with local pick-up centres available for those unwilling to pay the extra delivery charge. Personal shopping in the High Street will become a leisure activity rather than a necessity, with all the frills and fancies that go with something done for pleasure not for duty.

  Smart cards

  These cards, already in use in France, replace cash, keys, credit, debit and cash cards. They will not only let you into your home or your car but will automatically update all your bank account balances for you.

  Genetic fingerprints

  Instead of Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) which are easy to discover and replicate, we shall each have a fingerprint on our personal cards which cannot be reproduced by others.

  Genetic fingerprinting can be used to detect criminals from remains of tissue left behind at the scene of a crime, and also to diagnose hereditary and latent diseases. A national data-bank of genetic fingerprints seems possible one day.

  Soon, everything we know about ourselves, and somethings we do not know, will be available to anyone with the right number or fingerprint. What price privacy then, many will ask.

  Windscreen Maps

  Computerized autoguidance screens will become commonplace, telling you the best way to get to where you want to go and projected onto the windscreen, as in fighter aircraft, so that you need not take your eyes off the road. These systems can take weather, traffic density and roadworks into account and give you the best available route, turning the whole country, one suspects, into a constant traffic jam.

  Mileage bills

  Cables laid under the roads of our cities can trigger a meter inside a car programmed to charge different parts of the city at different rates, presenting you with the equivalent of a telephone bill at the end of the month for the use of your car on the city roads. Already designed for Hong Kong this system is potentially available now, although special licences for inner-city use are a more likely first step.

  The technology we shall undoubtedly take in our stride. Hole-in-the-wall banking caused hardly a flutter of an eyelid when it appeared and video-recorders are now part of the furniture in many homes. It is not the technology itself that is important but the
impact which, without conscious thought, it has on our lives. Microwave ovens were a clever idea, but their inventor could hardly have realized that the effect, once they were everywhere, would be to take the preparation of food out of the home and into the, increasingly automated, factory; to make cooking as it used to be into an activity of choice, not of necessity; to alter the habits of our homes, making the dining table outmoded for many, as each member of the family individually heats up his or her own meal as and when they require it; ‘grazing’, the advertising people call it.

  Whether these developments are for good or for ill must be our choice. Technology in itself is neutral. We can use it to enrich our lives or to let them lose all meaning. What we cannot do is to pretend that nothing has changed and live in a garden of remembrance as if time had stood still. It doesn’t and we can’t.

  Thinking Upside-Down

  Discontinuous change requires discontinuous thinking. If the new way of things is going to be different from the old, not just an improvement on it, then we shall need to look at everything in a new way. The new words really will signal new ideas. Not unnaturally, discontinuous upside-down thinking has never been popular with the upholders of continuity and the status quo. Copernicus and Galileo, arch-exponents of upside-down thinking, were not thanked for their pains. Jesus Christ, with his teaching that the meek should inherit the earth, that the poor were blessed and the first should be last in the ultimate scheme of things, died an untimely and unpleasant death. Nonetheless, their ideas live on, as good ideas do, to release new energies and new possibilities. In the long perspective of history it may seem that the really influential people in the last 100 years were not Hitler or Churchill, Stalin or Gorbachev, but Freud, Marx and Einstein, men who changed nothing except the way we think, but that changed everything. Francis Crick is not today a household name, yet he, with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, discovered the genetic code, DNA, and so created the science of microbiology and the industry of biotechnology on which much of our economic future may depend.