WHAT I PLANNED TO DO THIS WINTER

WHAT I PLANNED TO DO THIS WINTER  -- Get my personal biography in order along with all my writings, and write a guide for practitioners of Organizational Development (“Talking to myself while walking” series)

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 12, 2012

Few of my friends or colleagues are still living.  Although I just had my semi-annual physical and everything is fine, the clock is ticking.  We only have a certain number of days on earth, which, alas, are so easy to squander.

My biography is not sensational to say the least having stayed comfortably under the radar although participating in some interesting events, not to mention living when the world was abruptly changing course. 

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Pitrim Sorokin captured this phenomenon nearly one hundred years ago in “Social and Cultural Dynamics” (1917) suggesting Western society was at the end of a 600-year epoch.

He writes in this 1917 publication:

“Western society is in an extraordinary crisis.  Its body and mind are sick and there is hardly a spot on its body which is not sore, nor any nervous fiber which functions normally.” 

He calls the current epoch,

“The dying Sensate culture (i.e., gratuitous sex, promiscuity, self-indulgence, self-aggrandizement) of our magnificent yesterday.”

Then he adds,

“The oblique rays of the sun still illumine the glory of the passing epoch.  But the light is fading, and in the deepening shadows it becomes more and more difficult to see clearly and to orient ourselves safely in the confusions of the twilight.  The night of the transitory period begins to loom before us, with its nightmares, frightening shadows, and heartrending horrors.”

Sorokin indicated that wars and revolutions were not disappearing in the emerging twentieth century, but on the contrary, would grow to absolutely unprecedented heights, looming more imminent and more formidable than ever before.  

That aside, he envisioned the coming “Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow,” adding, “we are living, thinking and acting at the end of a brilliant 600-year-long Sensate day.”

My sense is that this new 600-year-long Ideational day we are now experiencing would not be a surprised to him with satellites, cyberspace, the Internet, cell phones, genomic medicine, and virtually everything in a state of flux.  The old and new are always in a state of tension and contention.

Take the “Idealistic culture” that preceded the Sensate culture, and became known as the "Age of Enlightenment."  

The Enlightenment focused on nature and witnessed an evolution in astronomy, medicine, mathematics, physics, chemistry, geology, metallurgy and engineering.  There was also a new sense of man emerging.  This was expressed in psychology, anthropology, sociology, political science and philosophy. 

With the Enlightenment, challenge was in the air directed at conventional wisdom, religions, governments and ideologies.  The new ideas of that day resulted in violent cultural and social upheavals and gave birth to the American and French Revolutions.

Small wonder that this current “dying Sensate day” has been known as the "Age of Anxiety."

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My biography will be mainly prepared for Beautiful Betty and family, and whatever she chooses to do with it when I’m gone.  My blessing has been the conceptual wonder of professor Sorokin, and how his vision tracks with my experience.

As to the organizational development (OD) book, it has percolating for years.  One of the paradoxes of my life has been, while a specialist in organization, I have never been comfortable in any organization.  Author Charles D. Hayes captured this irony in one of his books. 

That is less a negative then you might think.  OD by definition is the work of an outsider, that is to say, an unobtrusive observer.  The workplace has been my laboratory with the perspective of my first profession that of a bench chemist.  I have made studies, interventions, developed paradigms and gained insights that include:

(1)    How natural OD was to me as a student and how the institution of education resembled a factory.

(2)    How the lack of OD understanding compounded and confounded leadership over the last fifty years.

(3)    How OD served me in South Africa and South America as a young executive before I knew such a discipline existed.

(4)    How interventions of OD in police organizations in the 1970s  (re: the police rebellion in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the African American riot in Fairfax County, Virginia) revealed a pattern common to all complex organizations stuck in the past.

(5)    How setting up technical education at Honeywell led to the discovery of a new motivational tool.

(6)    How creating a Performance Management System for Human Resource Directors in Europe led to competency profiles for hiring, training, and placing professionals as well as guiding them with career roadmaps.

(7)    How MIT at Cambridge, Massachusetts proved a bridge too far between cognitive brilliance and emotional adolescence.

(8)    How eighty percent of the workforce with the mindset of an obedient twelve-year-old was suspended in terminal adolescence. 

(9)    How a mentoring system dealt with skills, readiness, personality, maturity, professionalism and prospects for leadership.

(10)              How unconventional OD instruments were developed and used.

(11)              How motivation/demotivation and majority/minority studies led to organizational self-fulfilling prophecies while proving the antithesis of what was expected to be the case. 

Stay tuned.  It should be fun.

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