The book "The Mexican Dream" by J.M.G. Le Clezio deals with the confrontation of the Renaissance, European, Spanish Conquerors with the Amerindian civilizations in what is now called Mexico. In reading this book, I was impacted by the description of the huge differences between the two civilizations. These differences were in many ways beyond the ability of the other to grasp. I see parallels in our contemporary societies and organizations.
In describing the culture and religions of the Amerindian civilizations, Le Clezio points out that there was no break between the perception of the divine and the human and between the natural and supernatural and this impacted every aspect and second of their lives. On their part, the Conquerors could not believe in the identity of man with the divine and in the reality of the supernatural. As described by Le Clezio, the world of the Amerindian was a magical world completely contrary to Renaissance Europeans imbued with the value of reason.
Le Clezio posits the costs of the two societies failing to exist together. The loss to the Europeans and the world was of the philosophy and art of these pre-Columbian civilizations. The loss was also in the fields of medicine, astronomy, irrigation and urbanism and even a mode of corporate governance where these societies were more advanced than the Europeans. The Western civilizations lost the benefit of an encounter with societies which could have contributed on issues of the harmony between man and the world, the balance between the body and the spirit and the union of the individual and the collective. Certainly, the cost was a great loss of life within the Amerindian societies.
While this example is one of the most extreme examples of the clash of cultures, it does serve to convey to me what is afoot when two national, organizational or departmental cultures fail to work together when ideally they could. Granted there were significant additional forces driving this clash - the desire by the Europeans for wealth and slaves and to undermine what was seen as antithetical approaches to religion. On the part of the Amerindians, a driver limiting understanding was a predisposition to see the Europeans as gods rather than humans based on projections of their own religious theology.
Using more contemporary terms, I would say that there were very few bridges to knowledge and understanding between the Amerindian and European societies and the foundations for such bridges were non-existent. One exception to this was the history created by Bernal Diaz del Castillo in his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva Espana based on his personal experiences. His history was begun in 1568 and published in 1632 many years after his death.
Distance and history provides us with more objectivity on the clash of European and Amerindian cultures than we might attain with events in our current world. In my efforts to derive meaning from history for our current lives and especially in an organizational context, I come up with the following.
When a single individual remains unheard, not-understood, unappreciated for who they are and what they have to say, this may lead to a problematic loss of knowledge. When an individual and their ideas become marginalized because the person is in a minority group, perceived as lesser in status - low in seniority, in a less prestigious discipline, etc., there is a loss of knowledge that can also be problematic. When an organizational representative encounters this reaction, the problem occurs on a larger and more dangerous scale.
I keep coming back to the few lone, un-heard, discounted voices of warning leading up to the events of 9/11 as examples of this phenomena. I come back to the engineers whose warning went unheeded with regard to launching Challenger under adverse weather conditions. I now have the additional example of a few people who were warning of things amiss with the financial dealings of Bernie Madoff and what turned out to be a fifty billion dollar loss to investors.
The solutions to these situations are quite complex. They involve the structure and governing mechanisms of the respective country, agency, corporation or department. They involve the norms that are in practice in support of greed, self-interest, a myopic parochialism, short-term profit or those tragic flaws resident in group dynamics known as "groupthink." They involve laws and regulations. They involve human values, ethics and the balancing of priorities.
My desire here is to set out one thing that we could all put into practice to our benefit with regard to building bridges to knowledge, understanding and to other people. It has to apply to all of these situations and be doable. It needs to have the ability to mediate self-interest, departmental norms, and political agendas. It needs to motivate the struggle to understand what is not readily understandable because of the context of differing cultures, language, and ways of making meaning of the world. I actually don't believe that anything will be the silver bullet here. In my next post, I will propose one action that I believe is a sine qua non of progress in this regard.
I welcome your comments.