Clash or Complement of Cultures? by Garcia Hector E.;

Author:Garcia, Hector E.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Hamilton Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

We have even corrupted the practice of democracy as the vehicle to attain those goals by enabling marketing (sound bites and staying-on-message) rather than education, excessive influence of money instead of the will of the people, and the motive of winning instead of the common good to define its practice.

We now focus on metrics, standardization, and consumption, as both ends and means.

This has reduced the inspiration and trust that had motivated citizens to form associations, work hard, behave ethically, and innovate, while it has generated blind compliance and fear of making mistakes. This shift has also strengthened bureaucracy and intellectual elitism—and the citizenry now believe they are less able to solve problems, and must rely on experts and leaders. Rather than perceiving reality as both/and as the great companies did in Collins’ book, through the mind-set of democracy, we now have been trained to see reality as either/or, and to expect effective results to complex problems by reacting to the sound bites of the right leader or expert. As John McKnight writes in The Careless Society,[9] our identity has been converted from being citizens to that of consumers and clients. The proverbial “can-do” attitude of Americans has been depleted, and has become more reliant on systems and experts.

In his paper “The Unfreezing of America,” Norwegian economist and productivity guru, Tor Dahl, wrote, “Productivity improvement is the only way to create new wealth… Productivity happens when we introduce variation in a product or service… Productivity improvement is rooted in knowledge, and a group of 20 people or more may represent several centuries of insight into an organization and its functioning. Collection of these insights will reveal that only about 8% of the work that is currently being done is being done perfectly—the participants themselves will say they can improve the other 92%. Implementing this potential for improvement creates prodigious changes in performance, and these very changes will eventually lay the basis for another turn of an upward oriented productivity spiral in the future… The Quality Revolution has been won. The Productivity Revolution is just beginning.” (Used with permission of Tor Dahl.)

The productivity revolution, as proposed by Tor Dahl, offers significant parallels to the need for the revolution implicit in the complementarity paradigm. Both are based on a new way of looking at the world. Productivity surfaces from the paradox between quality limitations and performance. It calls for a both/and perspective in contrast to our tendency to look at choices and problems as either/or tendency, and for an alternating flexibility that will keep pace with the changing circumstances of reality. As the productivity revolution evolves out of failures in quality, so the complementarity paradigm evolves from our history of failures in human interaction. Finally, productivity as complementarity taps into the collective knowledge of different individuals’ perspectives across time in order to create improvement.

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