Article by Alexandru Tulai, Change Management Specialist
The recent crises, manifested all over the world, have once again brought into question, more seriously than ever, the importance of the sustainability of organisations, a decisive factor in the development of communities and the ensuring of their prosperity. In this chapter, unfortunately, the news is not very good. Why?
From what I have observed from these organisations, be they private, state or non-governmental (NGOs), sustainability at this level is mainly determined by three important factors: the entrepreneurial spirit, the capacity to innovate, and the understanding of organisational development (the generation of culture). These three factors are completely separate, but what they have in common is that long-term organisational success (sustainability) occurs invariably where all three are present. Organisations have a voice which (as communities themselves, specialised in achieving objectives of various natures) gives consistency and strength to local communities. In order to better understand the phenomenon, perhaps it is worth taking a small trip into the history of civilisations.
The specialisation of (sub)communities is the immediate and logical result of the social division of labour which arose within the first human communities: hunters, fishermen, gatherers, those who take care of the household (living conditions), specialised practitioners of religion (the connection with the magical, inexplicable, unseen universe) etc. This was accentuated by exchanges between communities which were commercial (goods), spiritual (cultural, religious) or of good practices (social, technological). This phenomenon continues to expand and intensify even today.
The progress of civilisations (of communities, regardless of scale) has been, and continues to be, based on the same process: the conversion of innovation/invention from culture (knowledge transfer which could be scientific, technological, artistic, social, spiritual etc) through operationalisation (technology accompanied by technological transfer to organisations specialised in the resulting niches) in the daily use of the communities in which it was created. The immediate effect was felt, primarily, in the development of communities through:
- improving tool productivity (direct production)
- increasing the effectiveness of weapons (resulting in forcible appropriation of third-party production)
- increasing the performance of tools for investigating the surrounding reality (intensification of the innovation process to find new ways of development).
As a mark of how innovation, with respect to technology, progressed very slowly at first, it is telling that epochs, these huge periods of time, are now named after technologies: Palaeolithic (hewn stone), Neolithic (new stone), Brass (copper), Bronze and Iron. That is, social groupings (at different levels) received names of a completely different (technological) nature. This fact shows us the power of technological impact on communities. Even today things (again) do not look very different, as we refer to our own Information Age (in reference to the prevalence of ICT).
As the innovation process diversified (across the fields in which it was applied) and deepened, there was no longer a single universally dominant technology. As a result, the denomination characteristic was no longer the technological one, but that of the social relations in the communities (slavery, feudalism, capitalism etc), and this is the moment when a major social innovation appeared: the political system, with the immediate effect of generating a specialised economic system, which it subsumed for obvious reasons.
The results of this course of development, within the communities themselves, were:
- immediately: a massive, rapid increase in community income, individual comfort, social standard of well-being, and convenience, as an effect of the manifestation of a strong entrepreneurial spirit
- in the long term: increasing self-esteem and expectations relative to the standard of living; decreasing the need to make considerable personal efforts to learn and master cutting-edge knowledge, instead focusing on how to use it (following procedures and methodologies, this is due to the emergence of specialised organisations); and the emergence of a new social division of labour which produces efficient users of new technologies for commercial exchanges that respond to the inflated entrepreneurial spirit, distorted exclusively towards massive accumulation.
This is where our short foray into the history of civilisations ends. Because we find ourselves today exactly at an inflection point of the type just investigated, and here is where a discord between culture and civilisation appears. Culture: the creator of innovation and how to utilise it for the benefit of community members. Civilisation: the definition and development of a standard of personal well-being as a result of massive, extensive introduction into community use of innovation through technological transfer. Already the volume ratio between creator and user is highly disproportionate. As a result, the orientation towards increasing the level of knowledge (and for raising the social standard) is distorted towards increasing the degree of use (quantitative, volumetric, with minor innovation), basically a tendency to preserve, to block in the current state, which is more than enough for the entrepreneurship that receives more than the level it has ever hoped for, and that has decision-making power. This is already a mass phenomenon.
In this way, we can define the two concepts from the title:
- abilities are required to become a sufficient user, at any level of performance, of a technology related to certain solutions demanded by the market
- ● competences are required to become a sufficient creator of solutions, based on modern technologies, i.e. these are necessary to become a solver of current problems (see the article “On Context and Models”).
In the last two hundred years, cultural-scientific activity has taken place in creative cycles which have increasingly diversified, becoming shorter and recurring more frequently. And in the last thirty years, their acceleration has reached almost incredible levels.
The commercial (entrepreneurial) pressure to get the results of this activity into civilised use is huge. The capacity of educational systems is far from being able to cope with this pressure at a level where competence is generated. As a result, these systems are orientating themselves towards the creation of abilities, intending to satisfy an increase, extreme in both size and speed, in the number of “specialists” in their respective fields (people with abilities presented as competences), whilst very few people are able to actually make a difference. One of the typical symptoms of this is: “training” takes the place of knowledge transfer in formative education. The result, in the medium and long term, is disastrous. The quality of delivery in education is moving towards a bare minimum, focused on highly-paid areas (due to lack of competences) in which it delivers “specialists”, exclusively for reasons of volume and time. It dramatically reduces the willingness to undertake the consistent efforts to acquire competences, because abilities-based solutions are much cheaper and immediate, i.e. within the reach of a much wider mass of people.
What is particularly unsavoury is that they (the possessors of abilities) will react, at the critical mass level in society, according to their education: they will encourage their children to choose the same “successful path” as theirs. Traditional values, of course, based on effort to produce high added value, will be replaced by those that lead to an easy material and social success. What will happen to the educational system, the one designed to produce values that ensure the sustainability of communities? It will change massively (perhaps it has changed massively already). Restoring such a system is probably the longest, most difficult and most expensive process in society.
There exists also the perverse effect of hypertrophy of civilisation: we are thus witnessing its “triumph” over culture. It happened in all ages. How does culture take revenge? Simple: sustainability disappears. Can we not, however, find a solution, if we still have this very consistent information at our disposal?
I believe that this is an undertaking that requires synchronised efforts at a very high level. Whether from a national or transnational perspective, educational policies are the central concern here.
I also believe that high-level entrepreneurship, instead of waiting for crises to dampen its “momentum”, could participate, perhaps even initiate and consistently support programs that generate constantly and in sufficient volume the competences necessary for sustainability instead of abilities that respond at the moment but become obsolete quickly, because the added value they can produce is minimal.
Until then, it remains for small organisations to produce these competences by their own means (the hard way).
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