Monday, June 11, 2018

Trump's Disruption, Progressive Opportunity?

Do we dare to consider that "THEY" may be right? After all, sometimes the right things happen for the wrong reason.

I once heard management guru Tom Peters say, "if it ain't broke, break it," promoting disruption for any organization that is just cruising along--usually to oblivion. A management book came out with that title; and today "disruption" is a key word in organizational theory.

No one has been more disruptive to the accepted way of national and world governance than US President Donald Trump. As I write this, most of America's traditional allies feel "dissed" by his behavior in the G7, withdrawal from the Iran deal, the NAFTA deal, the Asian deal, and the climate change deal. He is reneging on decades of US assurances in Europe perhaps even NATO and the United Nations. He has abandoned environmental policy molded together through hundreds of years of community-based action fighting companies that trashed the land, the water, the air. He has turned his back on two hundred years of work to achieve pluralism and diversity. He has climaxed the death of civility in political conversation. He has promoted a tax system that will not only maintain, but also increase social economic inequality. 

Trump has assembled and put in charge a base of people who, like him, resent intellectuals, academic elites, the press, non-English speaking immigrants, non-Christians, social liberals, RINOs, and you name all the others. Resentment is their commonality. And this resentment leads to disruption on a grand scale in which all, including the people in his base, will suffer. 

But as Tom Peters and leadership trainers have noted, disruption can also lead to positive growth.  Peter's full quote was: "if it ain't broke, break it (or someone else will)." And most of the disruption that management masters counsel is guided and planned disruption by doing what you want to do better and achieve better results by doing it differently. 

Disruption is an opportunity as well as a threat.  If we make it so. 

I'm reading, Leading from the Emerging Future from the Presencing Institute at MIT.  The authors, both economists, take much of what we know and organize it in an engaging way. They start with noticing and admitting the disruptions that are occurring in our political economy and ecology. Then they plumb to the invisible collective mindsets of the visible negative results. These mental models or habits of thinking must be disrupted to preserve and progress our personal and social order. 

That makes me think about the belief systems I take for granted, especially those of moral behavior, political action, and economic life. What are those hidden ideologies that I am not questioning? Civil speech and collective action is the principle of politics of a democratic republic. Not resentment. Resentment is the demise of the commons, of collective action, of politics as a space of freedom.

If I am resenting Trump, and especially if I make my resentment a principle of my action or lack of action, am I not becoming what I resent? How do I change what I judge as harmful to my nation, my community, and the people I love without being resentful? 

And who can I work with on this, those who take responsibility and who engage not blame the resentful? How do we use the disruption to our present politics, communities, and world order that Trump occasions with all its resentment so that we disrupt the thinking and behavior behind it? And maybe, just maybe, push the human experiment onward. 

All our great leaders from Buddha and Isaiah, Socrates and Jesus, to Mandela and King challenged the conventional wisdom, the habits of thinking, the icons of resentment of their times without succumbing to resentment. It is that truth that will make us free.

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