It's impossible - until you see how...
Why so many struggle with, or shy away from, creating future-fit cultures
“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” — Clarke’s First Law.1
I publish on Substack and LinkedIn for two main reasons:
to help anyone wondering how they can go about creating future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness — based on my experience helping client organisations do that throughout Europe, Asia and the US for 40+ years;
to develop connections and relationships, especially with other experienced professionals, where we can learn from each other’s 2D perspectives — based on our unique respective experience, expertise, and backgrounds. 2
Valuing complementary 2D perspectives is the beating heart of a future-fit organisational culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
In such a culture, everyone is encouraged to bring, and respected for bringing, their own unique, individual, but unavoidably limited 2D perspective to day-to-day situations.
What is it that brings this way of being, seeing, doing, and thinking to life?
The genuine recognition — as embodied awareness, not just intellectual assent — that each and every human being on the planet, no matter how senior, qualified, or successful, can only ever grasp a one-sided, biased, and inevitably limited 2D perspective on the bigger picture 3D reality that none of us can ever see in its entirety.
When this penny genuinely drops, the individual embodies a 2D3D mindset.3
And whilst the 2D3D mindset is simple enough to understand in theory, it turns out not so easy to adopt, consistently, in practice.
Why’s that?
Because as human beings we are always at risk of attaching our identity to our narrow, biased, one-sided 2D perspective, and consequently mistaking it for the whole picture.
For example, a particular 2D perspective I’ve often encountered, very frequently on LinkedIn, is various forms of the assertion: “culture cannot be purposefully changed”.
I do appreciate that many people have had bad experiences with efforts to change culture. The ubiquity of such bad experiences is hardly surprising given that most efforts to change culture are based on woefully inadequate insights into what organisational culture actually is, how it forms, and how it can be reformed. 4
The assertion that “purposeful culture change is impossible” is easy to dismiss when you’ve witnessed first hand dozens of examples to the contrary over four decades. 5
I’ve come to see the claim “culture cannot be purposefully changed” as an individual mistaking “I don’t know how to do it” for “It can’t be done”.
As Clarke’s First Law above observes, this “I’m the expert and I say it’s impossible” is an occupational hazard especially amongst distinguished, long-in-the-tooth scientists.
Take, for example, Sir William Thompson.
Ennobled as Lord Kelvin in 1892, Thompson was a mathematician, mathematical physicist, engineer and, for more than half a century, a Professor of Natural Philosophy — which is what “science” was called before it was called “Science”. 6
He undertook important research into electricity, contributed to the formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and to the unification of physics — then in its infancy as a comprehensive discipline.
His stellar career led to his appointment as President of the Royal Society, the UK Academy of Sciences, from 1892 to 1895.
However, he also personified Clarke’s First Law, as he demonstrated in making the following three famously wrong but highly confident assertions:
“Radio has no future”.
“X-rays will prove to be a hoax”.
“I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation, other than ballooning”.
The last is particularly poignant given that Kelvin said it in 1896, just seven years before the Wright Brothers achieved the first powered flight in December 1903.
More eminent still was Albert Einstein, whose Theory of Relativity displaced the orthodoxy of the clockwork universe, established 200 years earlier by Sir Isaac Newton.
However, later in his long and distinguished scientific career, Einstein was himself unable to accept the Uncertainty Principle at the heart of quantum mechanics.
Hence his famous objection that “God doesn’t play dice” in a 1926 letter to his close friend and fellow physicist Max Born. Here’s how Born, who was awarded the physics Nobel Prize himself in 1954, described Einstein in his later years:
“He could no longer take in certain new ideas in physics which contradicted his own firmly held philosophical convictions.” 7
Science is often presented as being purely driven by dispassionate analysis of factual phenomena, unpolluted by human perceptual bias.
However, the way in which science actually progresses was crisply articulated by Max Planck, founding father of quantum theory:
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die — and a new generation grows up that is already familiar with it”. 8
This is sometimes paraphrased as “science progresses one funeral at a time”.
Although Clarke’s First Law is perhaps most notable in science, it’s by no means an affliction restricted to scientists. It’s actually a universal human failing, described 170 years ago by Arthur Schopenhauer as follows:
“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets us fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet. This explains many things, and among them the fact that everyone measures us with his own standard—generally about as long as a tailor's tape, and we have to put up with it: as also that no one will allow us to be taller than himself — a supposition which is once for all taken for granted.” 9
When anyone has built a career on the belief that purposeful culture change isn’t possible then changing that belief it’s not as easy as changing a belief about, say, whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable. 10
If your identity is invested in a belief that purposeful culture change isn’t possible — because you don’t know how to do it — then any evidence that might challenges that belief becomes a direct threat to your sense of self. As a consequence, no such evidence is allowed to pass your subconscious filtering — because seeing it would risk ego death. And ego death is something that, not surprisingly, human beings will go to great lengths to avoid. 11
The above is why 2D3D mindsets are central to unlocking innovation, agility, and adaptiveness in every one of the dozens of organisation I’ve worked with throughout Europe, Asia, and the US over the past 40 years.
In any organisation, the single most pervasive barrier to unlocking a future-fit culture is when one or more influential individuals simply won’t give up the delusion that their 2D perspective — and only their 2D perspective — is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Caught in such Seeing-Being Traps, reflecting Schopenhauer’s observation, they mistake the limits of their own biased, narrow, and one-sided 2D field of vision to be the limits of the world. 12
So long as influential individuals — who, by the way, it’s important to understand are NOT always people in the most senior positions — remain caught in Seeing-Being Traps, a future-fit organisational culture will forever remain unattainable.
An innovative, agile, adaptive organisational culture that’s fit for an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world is possible. But if but you and/or your current advisors think it isn’t, you’d be well advised to consider other perspectives.
And if you’re an organisational professional who thinks purposeful culture change is impossible, you might want to reflect on Clarke’s First Law and the Seeing-Being Trap.
Because if you get trapped, despite being able to console yourself that you’re in the illustrious company of the likes of Kelvin and Einstein — you won’t actually be of much help to your clients…
Ready to take action?
My website provides a range of free resources to help you build your organisations capacity for sense making, decision making, and action taking — as joined-up, dynamically iterated, and constantly renewing capabilities.
Discover how to make the shift for yourselves, by yourselves, from “organisation as machine designed and operated to maximise shareholder returns” to “organisation as human community for shaping a vibrant future by creating continuous new value in the world”.
Contact me to keynote at your next leadership conference or executive retreat, book one of my popular 90-minute "pick Geoff’s brains" sessions for senior executives, or enquire about my mentoring / supervision support for future-fit culture catalysts.
Clarke's three laws appear in his essay “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination”. Clarke's first law originally stood alone as “Clarke's Law”.
For more on 2D perspectives, see this previous article.
For more on 2D3D mindsets and their relationship to Carol Dweck’s Fixed and Growth mindsets, see this previous article.
Paradoxically, what culture is, how it forms, and how it can be reformed, turns out to be the secret everyone already knows.
Note that when culture change gains traction in ways that are “too in your face” it often triggers immune responses from the organisation that rapidly kill it off. The risk of this can be minimised when you understand why this happens — and how it can be avoided.
From “Einstein: His Life and Universe” by Walter Isaacson (p463).
“Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers” by Max Planck (1949).
Schopenhauer published a collection of thoughts in Parerga and Paralipomena - Greek for Appendices and Omissions - in 1851. These appeared in various English collections including Studies in Pessimism, translated by Thomas Bailey Saunders in 1913. The quote is from a section titled “Further Psychological Observations” [Item 69].
We all know not to put it in a fruit salad.
Building on Leon Festinger’s work on Cognitive Dissonance, Elliot Aronson found “Mental stress arises when the conflicts among cognitions threatens the person's positive self-image”. The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance: A Current Perspective (Aronson, Berkowitz, 1969).
For more on the Seeing-Being Trap see this previous article.