Chapter 2: The Problem

I have never been a big fan of addressing symptoms of something without getting to the root cause. I used to delight in annoying doctors, resisting the rheumatologist for prescribing medicine to treat the arthritis symptoms caused by rogue antibodies attacking my joints and resisting the neurologist prescribing medicine to treat the weakness caused by rogue antibodies attacking my nerve cells.  Where's the doctor who deals with rogue antibodies? Where at this massive university are the people studying why antibodies go rogue? Even at 22 I would look these highly educated professors in the face and say "I reject the basic premise of your treatment plan." I just knew the lens they were looking at me through was whopper-jawed.

The word I didn't know then was paradigm. When our basic assumptions and analytical framework are faulty, then no strategy, no technique, no effort will yield what we seek.  They couldn't cure George Washington with a bloodletting and they couldn't cure me with steroids.

The premise of The 8th Habit is that the pain and emptiness of an unfulfilled life in the modern world is a symptom of an outdated paradigm, an artifact of the Industrial Age we have all but left behind. He calls where we are today the Age of the Information/Knowledge Worker, which is characterized by a high degree of individual choice. Just as agriculture displaced hunters and gatherers, and factories later displaced farmers, knowledge workers are now displacing manufacturers. Few of us are still doing physical labor. Our society has shifted and most of us have shifted with it.

But the way we organize ourselves and relate to each other is still stuck in the past. Covey says, "[The Industrial Age] gave us our view of accounting, which makes people an expense and machines assets. Think about it. People are put on the P&L statement as an expense; equipment is put on the balance sheet as an investment." And that is just one example of how we have people in the "thing" category - expendable, replaceable, and controllable. If someone gives you trouble, get rid of them and bring in someone more malleable.

Covey says that as he traveled the world working with organizations large and small, he came to see that even the best were "absolutely filled with problems" related to this "people as things" paradigm.  Improvements can be made by tightening practices, introducing techniques, and addressing attitudes and behaviors, but the way to significant change is to work on the paradigm - the entire set of underlying assumptions that constitute the framework through which we view everything around us. If we see our coworkers as interchangeable, we'll never be able to do more than address the symptoms of organizational dysfunction.

Of course, people aren't things. We are mind, body, heart and soul, and all four parts of our nature must be engaged in order to feel fully alive. When our place of work (or school or family or church) suppresses one or more of these essential aspects of humanness, we experience pain. In the Industrial Age we did what we had to do anyway so that we could feed ourselves and our families. If we could move on, we did, but few of us had any real choice. According to Covey, this is the big change of the Knowledge Worker Age. So many more of us have real options with our lives - and when we are treated as expendable things we can respond. In essence, we are all volunteers now at work and at home. If something isn't right we change jobs, or we quit in place, bringing only part of ourselves to our work. When mind, body, heart, and soul are engaged, the creative energy of the whole self is unleashed, we do our best work, get on the path to greatness, and live happily.

My goal for this week is to pay attention to ways that the old paradigm manifests itself. I already see enormous implications for my work. (Governance is really just about techniques, after all, and the nonprofit organizations I work with are truly volunteer-based.) One caution Covey gives in this chapter is to resist using his work to diagnose others. "Perhaps you, too, are thinking that the people who really need a book like this aren't reading it. That very thought reveals co-dependency. If you look at the material through the weakness of another, you empower their weakness to continue to suck initiative, energy, and excitement from your life." I don't yet know how I'll be able to make the paradigm shift internally (seems like a lot of moving parts to me) but there are 300 pages to go and I have faith in Stephen Covey.