The Age Of Unreason

by Charles Handy

  (a) take responsibility for themselves and for their future;

  (b) have a clear view of what they want that future to be;

  (c) want to make sure that they get it; and

  (d) believe that they can.

  It looks easy. It seldom is. Taking a view of one’s future requires, first of all, that you believe that there will be a future. There are times, for all of us, when that seems doubtful. In those moods there is no learning, no changing. Then there is the question of what sort of future would we like it to be, for us. Sensibly, selfishly, it should fit our talents and our abilities, but we are sometimes the last people to know what those are. It should not be a fantasy future – that is escapism, but what is reality, we may well ask.

  The exercises at the end of this chapter are intended as one way to focus attention on these intractable questions. We may never get the answers right but unless we take a view we shall be mere flotsam on the waves of life. Fred Hirsch, an economist and philosopher, described what happens to many people under a pervasive materialism. We end up, he suggested, not by working for what we need but for what we want, for the ‘positional goods’ that keep us abreast or ahead of the notional Joneses. It’s a no-win situation for there will always be more Joneses to keep up with. It is unthinking, follow-my-neighbour, selfishness, not proper self-responsibility.

  2. A way of re-framing

  The second of the lubricants or necessary conditions is particularly useful in the second stage of the wheel of learning. Re-framing is the ability to see things, problems, situations or people in other ways, to look at them sideways, or upside-down; to put them in another perspective or another context; to think of them as opportunities not problems, as hiccups rather than disasters.

  Re-framing is important because it unlocks problems. Like an unexpected move on a chessboard it can give the whole situation a new look. It is akin to lateral thinking at times, to using the right side of the brain (the creative pattern-forming side) to complement the more logical left side.

  To conceive of one’s life without the word ‘retirement’ being relevant is to re-frame it. To think of a job as 2000 hours in a year instead of 45 weeks of 5 long days is to re-frame it, and by so doing to open up new possibilities. A federal organization is a re-framing of a decentralized organization, with important consequences.

  In business it has long been fashionable to ask ‘What business are you in?’ Is it cigarettes you are selling, or stress reducers, or social ease, or just a drug? The re-framing will have important consequences for the way the product is projected, distributed and priced.

  Entrepreneurs, when they are successful, often achieve their success through intuitive re-framing, connecting what was before unconnected, putting together an opportunity and a need.

  I remember the year when Britain was short of potatoes – the last year there was a drought. A friend and I went shopping for potatoes only to find there were none. Weeks later he asked me what I had done as a result.

  ‘Bought rice instead,’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘I rang a contact in India,’ he replied, ‘bought one thousand tons of potatoes to be shipped to the UK at a landed cost of £130 a ton and sold them in advance for £250 a ton.’

  ‘But, Percy,’ I said, calculating quickly, ‘that’s . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ he interrupted, ‘but don’t worry, it didn’t happen, the Indians refused an export permit.’

  Still, his re-framing nearly made him £120,000, while I bought rice.

  Businesses, at their best, re-frame all the time, re-thinking what they now call their portfolios of mini-businesses, re-defining those businesses, and their markets, checking to make sure that there are as many growing businesses as declining ones. Individuals need to do the same, looking at their portfolios of talents, recognizing that what might be a disadvantage in one situation could be an asset in another, as when Mary realized that her problem – she could only talk naturally to people when she didn’t have to look at them – made her a natural for telephone selling.

  Some people are natural re-framers. Most of us cannot do it alone. Other people always help. Friendly groups help one to re-think the problem or the situation. It helps if they are people outside the problem because they will bring different ideas to bear. Group-think is dangerous because like-minded groups have like-minded ideas and find it hard amongst themselves to re-frame any situation.

  I am a great believer in ‘Irish Education’ after the Irishman who reputedly said, ‘How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?’ Truth, said David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, springs from argument amongst friends. Even if we don’t convince the friends, we often help ourselves to see things in a new way as we look for new angles in the argument.

  Metaphors and analogies help. Schon’s idea of the ‘displacement of concepts’ mentioned in Chapter 1 as an aid to creativity is a useful discipline, to try to find other metaphors, or words from other fields, to describe the problem or the dilemma. There are other drills and disciplines to stretch the mind, most usefully in some of Edward de Bono’s books.

  We are all the prisoners of our past. It is hard to think of things except in the way we have always thought of them. But that way solves no problems and seldom changes anything. It is certainly no way to deal with discontinuity. We must accustom ourselves to asking ‘Why?’ of what already is and ‘Why not?’ to any possible re-framing. It can become a useful game.

  For instance, why do women take their husband’s name when they marry? Why not keep their own, or both choose a new common name? Why do we make marriage vows for ever, and then break them? Why not make them for shorter terms, and then renew them? Why do so many houses have their best rooms in the front, looking over the parking space? Why not put all entrances at the side? And so on . . .

  Upside-down thinking, re-framing, is largely a habit of mind. Those who want to learn in life, and to change comfortably, need to practise it.

  3. A Negative Capability

  Keats defined ‘negative capability’ in his letters in 1817, as ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts’. I would extend the meaning to include the capacity to live with mistakes and failures without being downhearted or dismayed.

  Learning and changing are never clear and never sure. Whenever we change we step out a little into the unknown. We will never know enough about that unknown to be certain of the result. We will get it wrong some of the time. Doubt and mistakes must not be allowed to disturb us because it is from them that we learn. Theories are no good, Karl Popper argued, unless it is possible to prove them wrong. If they are bound to be right they are either tautologies, saying nothing useful, or trivial, saying nothing important.

  Entrepreneurs, the successful ones, have on average nine failures for every success. It is only the successes that you will hear about, the failures they credit to experience. Oil companies expect to drill nine empty wells for every one that flows. Getting it wrong is part of getting it right. As with my friend and the potatoes, if you do not try you will not succeed and if it fails, there is always another day, another opportunity. Negative capability is an attitude of mind which learners need to cultivate, to help them to write off their mistakes as experience. It helps to get your first failures early on; the later ones are then less painful. Those who have a gilded youth, in which success leads on to success, are sometimes the least experimental and the most conservative as they grow older because the fear of failure looms larger.

  We were about to appoint a new Professor. The person in question was well-known to us, a brilliant lecturer, an authority in his field, a sought-after consultant. Why then were there so many unspoken reservations in the faces around the table? Someone then captured it for us: ‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘Richard has no decent doubt.’ Without that decent doubt there was no questioning, no learning, no deliberate change. To Richard, certainty was precious, a negative capability something he would not understand.

  We
learn by our mistakes, as we always tell ourselves, not from our successes; but perhaps we do not really believe it. We should, for we change by exploration not by retracing well-known paths. We start our learning with uncertainties and doubts, with questions to be resolved. We grow older wondering who we will be and what we will do. For organizations as for individuals life is a book still to be written. If we cannot live with these uncertainties we will not learn and change will always be an unpleasant surprise.

  Negative capability, that capacity to live with uncertainty and mistake, is not given to everyone. Keats complained that Coleridge did not have it and missed a trick or two thereby. It helps, clearly, to have a belief that overrides the uncertainty. For some it is a feeling that their book of life is already written, that they are merely turning the pages. For others it is a belief in a superior being, a God. For myself, I have become convinced of the truth behind the Coda of Julian of Norwich, a holy lady in fourteenth century Britain: ‘All will be well, and all manner of thing will be well’, she said, again and again. Believe that, although one cannot know in what way all will be well, and a negative capability is easy.

  The Blocks To Change

  It is, unfortunately, all too easy to stop the lubricants reaching the wheel. A proper selfishness, re-framing and a negative capability are fragile. It is easier to stop them than to encourage them, often unintentionally. The principal blocks are listed here.

  The ‘They’ syndrome

  Mary was divorcing her army husband. Where would she live, I asked, when she had to leave her army apartment. ‘They haven’t told me yet,’ she said.

  ‘Who are they?’ I asked.

  ‘They haven’t told me who they are yet, have they?’ she replied, irritated at my seeming stupidity.

  It is easy to laugh but once I waited outside the door of the Personnel Manager of the multinational company of my youth. A wily old Scot passed by, a veteran of that place and a wise counsellor.

  ‘What are you waiting for, laddie?’ he asked.

  ‘I am waiting to see what they are planning for me.’

  ‘Och, invest in yourself, my boy, don’t wait for them. Invest in yourself, if you don’t why should they?’

  It was one of those timely triggers. Until that moment I was leaving it all to ‘them’, I had no sense of personal responsibility for my own future. That had been delegated to the Personnel Department. ‘They’ would tell me. Unfortunately, ‘they’ wondered why I had been so lackadaisical about my own development and did not, as Jock forecast, see any great reason to continue their investment in my future unless I also invested in it.

  Too many delegate their futures and their questions to some mysterious ‘they’. ‘They’ will set the syllabus for life just as ‘they’ set the syllabus for our courses at school. ‘They’ know what is best, ‘they’ must know what they are doing. ‘They’ are in charge, leave it to ‘them’. The phrases and excuses are endless. One of the strange things about growing older is the gradual realization that ‘they’ don’t know, that the Treasury is not all-wise, that ‘they’ are on the whole just like you, muddling through, and not very interested in you anyway.

  Futility/humility

  Learning starts with a belief in oneself. It is for all of us a fragile belief, easily shattered. In my early days in that big company, I found myself in Malaysia with, effectively, a license to wander through the departments. I came across what seemed to me to be some gross inefficiencies. I worked out some better options, sent them to the Operations Manager and waited – for his thanks. He sent for me.

  ‘How long have you been out here?’ he asked.

  ‘Six months,’ I replied.

  ‘And how long has this company been successfully doing business here?’

  ‘About fifty years, I suppose.’

  ‘Quite so, fifty-four in fact; and do you suppose that in six months you know better than the rest of us and our predecessors in fifty-four years?’

  I asked no more questions for the next three years, had no more ideas, made no more proposals. My social life prospered, I recall, but I stopped learning, and growing, and changing.

  If one remark killed my belief in myself in that place, one can easily work out why it is that the unemployed or the newly redundant have little urge or energy to turn that wheel of learning. All they want is to turn the clock back and to have the same job again. We have made the ‘job’ so essential to a man’s concept of himself, and now to many a woman’s, that the loss of it, often through no fault of his own, can shatter his sense of identity, of personal worth, of self-esteem, for a while at least.

  Self-doubt is pernicious. Humble, self-doubting people, may ask the questions but they do not press for answers or for action. ‘Others need or deserve it more than I’ they say, seeking always the back of the queue even if the queue is really only a huddle. John needs my help, the firm cannot spare me, my needs can wait. The selfishness is laudable, often, but the learning gets postponed. Other people become a prop for or an excuse for our lack of self-responsibility.

  Self-doubters often fear success. Success puts more pressure on them to take more responsibility for even more action. Failure for some is easier to handle, particularly if you plan for it. David, his teachers noted, although a clever boy, had stopped working some months before his big exams. They tried to coax him back to work with forecasts of what he might achieve. They tried to frighten him with forecasts of what he might not achieve. Nothing worked. He did as badly as they feared, but he had his excuse, he had done no work. His failure was not an indictment of his ability but only of his attitude. His own conception of himself as a clever lad, was untouched. They call it a form of ‘attribution theory’; it is a way of dodging failure, of not learning in order to protect a fragile sense of self. He won’t start to learn again until he is strong enough in his self-confidence to take success or failure in his stride.

  The theft of purposes

  Proper, responsible selfishness, involves a purpose and a goal. It is that goal which pulls out the energy to move the wheel. Diminish that goal, displace it or, worst of all, disallow it and we remove all incentive to learn or to change. Proper selfishness, however, recognizes that the goal needs to be tuned to the goals of the group, or the organization, or society, as well as being in line with our own needs and our own talents. Only improper selfishness sets goals at odds with the bits of humanity that matter to oneself.

  It is tempting to impose our goals on other people, particularly on children or our subordinates. It is tempting for society to try to impose its priorities on everybody. The strategy will however be self-defeating if our goals, or society’s goals, do not fit the goals of the others. We may get our way but we don’t get their learning. They may have to comply but they will not change. We have pushed out their goals with ours and stolen their purposes. It is a pernicious form of theft which kills the will to learn. The apathy and disillusion of many people in organizations, the indifference and apparent indolence of the unemployed is often due to the fact that there is no room for their purposes or goals in our scheme of things. Left goal-less, they comply, drift or rebel.

  In a sensible world the goals are negotiated. The concept of the do’nut in Chapter 5 allows the organization to dictate the core and the perimeter of one’s role, but allows discretion in the middle with the purposes of that discretion to be agreed. It is so, or could be so, with much of life. Responsible selfishness knows that there are core duties and necessary boundaries but also that there must be room for self-expression. Squeeze it out, as tidy-minded bureaucrats so often do, and we kill any motivation to learn.

  The missing forgiveness

  I asked an American the secret of his firm’s obviously successful development policy. He looked me straight in the eye. ‘Forgiveness,’ he said. ‘We give them big jobs and big responsibilities. Inevitably they make mistakes, we can’t check them all the time and don’t want to. They learn, we forgive, they don’t make the mistake again.’


  He was unusual. Too many organizations use their appraisal schemes and their confidential files to record our errors and our small disasters. They use them to chastise us with, hoping to inspire us, or to frighten us to do better. It might work once but in future we will make sure that we do not venture far enough from the beaten track to make any mistake. Yet no experiment, no test of new ideas, means no learning and no change. As in organizations, so it can be in families.

  The evidence is quite consistent, if you reward the good and ignore or forgive the bad, the good will occur more frequently and the bad will gradually disappear. A concern over trouble in the classroom led to research into the way teachers allocated praise and blame. About equally, it seemed, except that all praise was for academic work and all blame was for behaviour. The teachers were coached to only give praise, for both academic work and good behaviour and to ignore the bad. It worked. Within a few weeks unruly behaviour had almost disappeared.

  More difficult than forgiving others is to forgive oneself. That turns out to be one of the real blocks to change. We as individuals need to accept our past but then to turn our backs on it. Organizations often do it by changing their name, individuals by moving house, or changing spouses. It does not have to be so dramatic. Scrapbooks, I believe, are useful therapy – they are a way of putting the past to bed, decorously. Then we can move forward.

  Putting The Theory To Work

  If we want to change comfortably and deliberately we each have to start turning our own personal wheel of learning. The lubricants will make it easier – some proper selfishness, a constant effort to re-frame our bit of the world, and a readiness to forgive yourself.

  Give yourself space, a purpose and goals to reach, questions to answer: find some friends to be your mentors, walk in other worlds, don’t be afraid to be wrong.