The End of the Belief in Separation

What I’ve decided today is that I need to have a crack at making an impact on individual and collective leadership. I’m calling this the “New Beginning Series” but it’s really about offering an alternative to how things have been. 

The over-aching theme is moving away from separation towards recognising the connection of all things to each other. And what if we were to rewrite the business school rules from that premise?

Many brilliant people have already done the work of naming the meta-crisis:  the tangle of interconnected problems sitting underneath so much of what’s happening in the world right now. That’s not what I’m trying to add to. What I want to start is the conversation about what the solution might look like, and what our responsibility is within it — both individually, as leaders, and collectively, as institutions.

Separation is the philosophical and practical belief that matter precedes energy, and that we live in a material universe as separate units. An alternative is unity: that all things emanate from a unified field and are thus connected — which allows us to explain things the material view can’t. Quantum mechanics talks about entanglement, where they’ve been able to measure atoms which aren’t physically co-located  and can still relate to one another.

I remember at business school, in my business strategy subject, they called it chaos theory. It was the alternative to the more mechanistic view of change — the idea that you could define the outcome, conduct a gap analysis, and change one at a time, and it would all fall into place. The way chaos theory was explained to me then was that if a bird flapped its wings in China, it could affect an earthquake in San Francisco. It encouraged non-linear thinking, an adaptive view of strategy, and letting go of the assumption that the future could be predicted. That was around the year 2000. Since then we’ve become an even more integrated, more polarised, and less predictable society. 

The first principle for organisations is to recognise they are part of a natural system, rather than automatically aiming to be at the top of a material hierarchy. An organisation with a profit motive and no conscience is like an apex predator — it consumes everything in pursuit of more return, without factoring in the cost of what that consumption does to the broader, often unintended, collective. That narrowness of goal, without a recognition of broader responsibility, is something society is now having to reckon with. Governments alone can’t be responsible for regulating it. I believe our leaders – especially this new generation – can make that jump in my lifetime. 

Plenty of organisations and institutions are already working in this space: B Corp, the balanced scorecard, the UN Sustainable Development Goals. But it’s time the shift came from within the people who work inside these institutions, not from outside regulation or encouragement. I believe this has to be a bottoms-up change that happens within people because the truth is that if this becomes another idea or a system like communism or socialism, that’s just another label that people can exploit for their own personal gain.

Firstly, what inhibits leadership in this area. Many people feel that systemic incentives work against prosocial, collective decision-making. ie. if everyone else is behaving this way, then what’s the point? or why bother? In practice, this perpetuates decisions which knowingly create negative collective or community consequences, but which maximise dominance in a market or competitive position. Many of these decisions are often culturally rewarded — implicitly, and often explicitly.