It is comparatively easy to help organisations to learn when they are facing a crisis. What is less easy is to enable them to learn continually. This requires moving learning from being perceived as a mandatory requirement to being embraced as a requirement for individual and collective growth, a requirement for life.
Never have we been so forewarned about a crisis that is unfolding and worsening in front of us. And too many organisations and sectors remain hell-bent on adopting the targets that they can get away with rather than the targets that are needed.
It is a huge conundrum for a leadership culture that has been trained to value quick wins, power, profit and prestige. The culture must shift to a heart-centred leadership that puts love for the living world first. Navigating that shift is the defining challenge of our time.
We tend to think of organisations as being more like machines than living systems. We speak of “running the organisation”, “owners of the business” and leaders who “drive change”. The language is appropriate for a car.