How to Design and Promote Degenerative Cultures
Designing for widespread dissatisfaction , polarization, despair, and some success! Oh! — And the Regenerative Alternative
I want to give you a reason to read this article. All of it! The article offers a framework of all that makes your life work, or not. It is a living systems framework applied for making sense of government, business, education theories, and even families in chaos. It is one of my denser articles and complex relationships are offered. But you will be glad you did because it can give you hope, a plan for change in human institutions, and leadership approaches, even as it sometime may seem overwhelming. In other words, it is going to be ‘good for you.’ And for your roles in business and institutions. And even as a citizen who worries if we are ‘going to hell in the proverbially hand basket. But it is also about a light at the end of the tunnel and how to become the trainmaster.
Abstract Overview: How to design Bias, particularly racial bias, into everything.Ensuring the conditions and infrastructure for nurturing exclusion, inequity, injustice and therefore violence and degeneration of society and communities are present and well-honed is the usual. Or as we go along, I offer how to take the road less traveled as a Regenerative alternative.
Designing Biased Systems
We hear that bias in structured into business. And society. Even institutions intended to do good. What does that mean? One thing it conveys is the invisibility of “it is working us,” without our permission. It makes it hard to change, to manage or to design out. Even to make it transparent to others. It is hard to understand the source, leaving us surprised by the great many shortfalls in caring and bringing attention to being fair, equitable, or non-discriminatory.
If one is repeatedly shocked by the world we live in and how we treat one another and other life forms, it means we don’t understand paradigms or worldviews and how they frame what we see, much less the power they have OVER US. Paradigms have tremendous invisible dominion over how we think and act . They literally shape our actions and thoughts, It's time to deepen our understanding of ‘what sources the way things come into being. Because we cannot build a meaningful or effective life on hidden, false, or incomplete premises.
If someone asked me how I would design a system (an organization, institutions, or nation) so that it is creating degenerative processes that lead to inequity, injustice, and exclusion of selected groups, I would offer these four necessary organizing concepts and conditions. These of course will be the opposite of organizing concepts and conditions for regenerative process. But we will return to that a bit further along.
I. A Degenerative Paradigm is Shaped By: Four Degenerative Cultural and Structural frames that provide the conditions for Bias:
Goal: Hierarchies of Power & Progression with procedures that promote competitiveness and scarcity assumptions ( Survival of Fittest) designed into economics and governance; And those with power over others VS an alternative where individual bring creative contribution within strategically-focused by stakeholder coalitions & consortiums
Ground-Mindset and Pursuits: Currently, the fixed, performance & recently growth, mindsets are foreground; Knowledge & skill focused vs. A Developmental Mindset. Beyond fixed or even growth. Foreground consideration becomes developing inner and outer ableness, without external evaluation, of performance
Takes Direction From: External Authority on knowing and Certification of Truth & achievement vs. self-determining, self-development, self-managed assessments
Instruments of study for & arbitration of truth: Sciences of Fragmentation -vs. Science of Wholes
How biases are shaped? Never develop Systemic Critical Thinking Skills and ensure No Inner Being Development:
Ground: through a fixed mindset we see others, and often ourselves as fixed from birth in intelligence and aptitude. With growth mindset, we believe with effort, humans can rise about their station so to speak, with effort and education. All institutions are built from fixed mindset, resulting in measurable performance and make this the primary driver of endeavors, based on other-designated criteria and competencies.
As an outcome, humans do not learn to use endeavors to develop themselves, that is using the endeavors, as the substrate, the material for development. Life is not seen as material to developing Being, character, and attitude. We don’t use the innate, but undeveloped drive to engage in thinking about complex issues so we do not engage in evolving our ableness for development. We don’t see understanding as open ended. Or the application of personal agency as desirable to meaningful offerings we make. We don’t learn to love pouring ‘all of ourself’ into gaining the skills which is common in many indigenous and wisdom traditions people do.
Without this mindset, the lens of the intention to embed development into our own evolving process, is lost in the morass of other’s delegated assignments and evaluations of our performance.
A Developmental mindset is about creating ableness to be self-directed, self-determining, self-managing, because we are ensconced in the Will School of Life. A Will School means we develop our commitment to using our personal agency. We build capability to using a sourcing mind whereby we can self-observe the sources of our ideas (rather than think we thought we though the ideas for ourselves). We understand the source of our personal behavior and its effects on the world around us. We don’t stop with borrowed knowledge, but seek to understanding the working of ourselves, and humans in collectives, as well as the universe we inhabit. That is possible when development processes are integrated fully with self-directed self-selected, created, and evaluated efforts. Higher performance is an outcome of Will plus capability. That is a Developmental Mindset
Paradigms at work
For example, in a developmental mindset, our paradigm or world view is a fundamental instrument of development and a foreground in practice. Development is applied to what we can know about and come to understand. We assess ourselves and what worldview we are in. And self-management is our paradigm. The narrowest paradigm or worldview is an extract-value paradigm which assumes there is not enough to go around, so we need to be sure and get our share. And ‘our share’ needs to come with a premium or some return over what we put in at the beginning. We all want raises, interest on our money, valued growth from our assets. But when we get attached to this way of viewing the world, it usually means we are never able to feel we have enough and share less well with others outside OUR group. Then we design or accept the design of systems that have an unfair number of fingers on the scale when payouts are made. It sets us up against one another in families, education arenas, governing processes and especially in places our income might be affected, like work or our businesses.
Arrest disorder Paradigm: This world view picks sides and blames ‘them’ for damaging the context we live in. From an arrest disorder view, we use laws, advocacy, restraining orders to seek to arrest the harm we see being done by others. Sometimes we acknowledge it is not intentional, but still see the harm and designate ourselves to arrest it continuing. There are good guys versus bad guys in elections, policy development, and in the exercise of first amendment rights. This polarizing, most often, escalates the distance between values which are from ‘ the other’ paradigm as they show up. The outcome seems alinated, more often overlapping, from the divide-and-conquer mode. Efforts are made to create incentivize changes in behavior. But there is also pressure tactics of alligences against one another. Question: Can we catch ourselves in this mode and shift our paradigm to a regenerative development one?
Humanist worldview: This worldview comes into play when a group of humans embraces a seemingly higher or broader source for what is right and true. Religious can be a source. Nature may become a template and design becomes human-centered.
It is also a worldview that has been used to colonize or condition others we think need change.. This is the Do-Good paradigm or human-centered world since humans seem to be anthropocentric when looking at the world this way. It offers up strongly held ideas which often become ideals. And the ideologies and even resulting in ideologues. With interest groups to help you if you want to be told what to belief and even positions to take.
The above three paradigms and worldviews are often on automatic in people, about what they see, base on which side ones sees themselves as on. Consciousness and inner work are not on their radar, yet. Although purposes, values, missions, and visions are their stock and trade. We will come back to a Living Systems worldview and Regenerative paradigm, which is about consciousness, nothing generic, standardized. It is about one-of-one situations, singular, specific to a Place and event. No Best practices, templates or experts.
Goals: Implications of a Fixed Performance Mindset:
All business systems design and goals are then assessed based on systems that are built for competitiveness based on the belief that there is serious scarcity of assets, means, and opportunities. Therefore, the paradigm is one of ‘extract value.’ The assumption is there are only so many openings, ideas, methods (best practices) and materials available. Everyone feels a need to compete for these prizes and to submit to being judged relative to others. Or they fall in despair because they feel interminably judged and denied. Ownership of valued possessions must be sought even beyond other end states of affirmation and to culminate in the ableness to endlessly grow those assets, passively preferably, in the material world. That is the ultimate definition of success. Plus, of course, to be able to buy assets from others, just in order to own them, which is a measure of having arrived. We set up systems to manage and retain this structure of competitiveness by the other three conditioning points on the degenerative paradigm tetrad.
The foundation of the competitive mental and physical infrastructure is to have viable footing so when people are rated and ranked by their right-to, and ability to, function in the competitive domains, we come out on top. Some will be seen as much smarter by some socially constructed measures therefore using shared unquestionable criteria that clarifies how people compare relative to others. Like global test scores, like entrance to influential organizations, prestigious awards, and school grades and placement, so we can find the bestpeople. We see everything through a competitive lens even when it makes us sick and depressed, we belief it.
Of course, to do this broadly, we have to put people into a select set of categories that make it clear for a lifetime where they fit. Even our personality can be typed making us one of four or nine types. We are not Unique! Demarcation of class rank, academic and workplace achievement, institutional degrees, sorted intelligences, and club loyalties need be publicly clear. Only the upper ranking can mess with the power structure. The system demands, “We require these records of attainment and intelligence be put into a system that holds them and provides them to potential employers, institutions, and future assessors of character.” Performance records, reported by other-qualified examiners would need to be accessed and protected from modification as times and contributions changed. The we make sure there is normalization of this structure. It is fixed from an early age by those with authority.
Note from author: As you read this, I hope you are laughing at how absurd and yet accurate this description is. I am laughing a sarcastic guffaw even as I write. Somewhat sinister sound sometimes. But to continue…
Direction: There would be bodies of permanent retainers of judgements. It would ensure that it had the rating and ranking competencies established in order to control the scarcity economics and ability to provide governance of others based on moneyed groups. It would create a godhead of authority to judge who deserves what confirmation is given, as knowledge holders, who provided a system of conferring their blessings, to the right people. We organize those who are the authoritative bestowers to scale the best ideas into all institutions and spread the word. We ensure only certified degreed people could tell others what they were doing, what they thought and how each fit in the system. Because the authoritative word is that, “there is no way for humans to observe themselves and therefore they require external feedback . That is all according to our adopted philosophy of behaviorism.[1][2]
Instrument: The organized systems would have the idea that the levels of smarts are based on fixed intelligences and external ordained recognition at birth pretty much. People in the system would request and require research by ‘objective scientist that break down hard questions into their simplest pieces and subjects, with the belief that adding it all up would give us some semblance of answers, that the parts represented the whole, and that objectivity gives us proof of how things work. We then can label people who think they can look at living wholes, as unscientific and abstract since without the senses being used, we cannot double blind, with repeatedly testing, the fragmented subject. This is based on the theory that the senses are the only valid source of knowing. Or maybe we accept the instrument of the senses like microscopes, stethoscopes, or telescopes.
Note of Author: This likely feels like a caricature or allegory for a novel like Animal Farm. I could write that, but I feel is better use of my time to work on the regenerative (re)design
“Fixing “the System in our Favor
Now that we can see what infrastructure and conditions are needed to fuel bias, let’s look at how it would work to enable a degenerative practice, with a resulting advantage because it is built to manipulate. The infrastructure and conditions allowing designing for Degenerative outcomes. For example, business and other organizations, not necessarily with evil intend follow the ‘fill in the lines as a template and don’t question the template. They do so from ignorance and lack of development of critical thinking including checking our sourcing of infrastructure and premises. Where do the ideas I am using come from? Including a massive misinterpretation of Charles Darwin’s the Darwinians which we swallowed hook line and sinker, and by the followers of Adam Smith’s, from their treatises How are we playing into a game not even of our making by not allowing for reflection? Or questioning.
II Structuring Work and Life with a Degenerative Worldview
With the infrastructure and conditions just outlined in place, and which we have well sold in the Western World, there is an almost ready-make degenerative work design and management practice possible. The degenerative design is built on a Hierarchy of Competitions, a paradigm of abstractions and generic ideas that can be spread easily, direction-setting taken from credentialed external authorities, and the use of a Science of Fragmented Variables to determine truth and never understand the working of a whole.
Goal: Hierarchies of Competition[3]
It is characterized by a narrowing ladder of fewer and fewer jobs. Persons external to the system (experts and those with rank) decide who can move up and when they are stopped. These jobs have increasing prestige, status, power, and pay as one climbs toward the top. Criteria is created to rate and rank a fit with the hierarchical levels, established by those at the top
Ground-Paradigms of Abstractions and Generics
People rarely notice they have a worldview or paradigm that was likely handed to them in the earlier years when they were being conditioned and socialized to cultural norms and acceptable social constructs. Paradigms of extracting value and Arresting disorder are used to design everything in institutions and prepare people to compete in them. Humans and other beings are seen as ‘fixed’ from birth and placed in arbitrary abstract categorizes across unique beings. The promotion of “do-good” ideas lead to ideologies and polarizing ideologies are fostered and entrenched and lead to isolating us from diverse thinking. They teach us to become identified with our ideologies and communities of believers of the same ideology.
Direction: Taken From Credentialed External Sources
Very few are allowed to have a say in truth. Ph.D., ministers and priests, Nobel Laurates. And even those often take on the truths of superiors or authorities; or a recognized figure, like a Pope. Universities with credentialed parties are trusted to specify the competencies for each level and role in the hierarchy, which is confirmed by journals and journalists who publish, ensuring spreading the credibility. Then consultants who use published work to promote their ‘best practices” which are intended to create generic standards. To be a part of the truth squad you need more credentials and a published body of work. I knew when I chased these ends and engaged in these pursuits, that the process and those goals to be acknowledged by the credentialed one, did not make me smarter, more useful, but just playing the system.
Instruments of study : Science of Isolated Variables
Research is done using scientific method which segments and isolates the variables to be studied independent of the whole which leaves partial views of the working of human behavior, learning methods, and motivations and beings that are unnested in any context or dynamic relationship. You cannot beat the system, using the system. You have to redesign the system undoing the previous one in the process by exposing it and its well-intended sourcing but limiting outcomes for even the good intentions compared to the new system design.
We also easily fall into the routine of convincing ourselves that the answers are drawn from objective and unbiases sources. And that we too are objective and unbiases since we stick to what our senses ‘tell us.’ Never taught our senses are data passed through our worldview on the way to ‘objective data.” We are not taught to examine this three-step filtering of our senses or even the fragmented partitioning we do based on other’, and our own, outdated and inaccurately premised models.
Summary of Degenerative Conditioning:
Educate people to Fit in, use accepted social constructs and not question. Normalize the Infrastructure, conditions, and answers! A belief in and fear of competition must be instilled in the hearts and minds of most beings. It starts early with parents and is continued through all schooling. Make people mindful of the self-centered based effects on them. And tell them how they compare on everything. This is based on the idea that there is extreme scarcity of opportunity, intelligence, and caring. Survival of the fittest is natural and normal, expansion is the only form of growth. I would build arguments with a tight logic that collaboration of beings with individual contribution is not natural, nor a possible state for humans. Competition creates more opportunities and success. It is evolution’s way for each, and all involved. Don’t share unless you want to give away to winning hand.
III. Finally: An Alternative—
Goal: A Non-Competitive Hierarchies of Contribution. For over 60 years we have used a Hierarchy of Contribution where everyone can promise their own contribution within a strategic corporate process and approval of return on funding process. There are three nested Lines of Work (individual, collectives, and greater whole beneficiaries;) which are to be held with external considering (caring for more than ourselves) and internal local of control (accountable for my effects on others) and guided by Personal agency (avoiding passivity when more is needed). Exercising my Will. For this to be effective, it best takes place within a Developmental Organization as described above. Each person exercise Will within a Promises Beyond Ableness Matrix Framework as a management and development structure.
Ground: Developmental Mindset & Culture; There are rituals that embrace Developmental processes for how we know (epistemology), what our work is in the world and purpose of our existence (cosmology), how we become who we are and bring other creations into the world (ontology), how we become able at doing what we do (technology).
Direction: Self-Determined Ordering & Organizing: We become skilled at self-observing and directing our inner working and self-managing of our doing in the world.
Science of Wholes: Designing out the Laws of Degeneration: Replacing them with the 7 Laws of Regeneration
Regenerative Work Design
Hierarchy of Contribution:
Having a Developmental mindset and paradigm is based in the cosmology of humans being as self-developing species with a role to enable conscious mental energy fields. And therefore, humans need to be in, in some form, Developmental institutions . It is not a job for rugged individuals, but for personal agency in a developmental process. There are also Developmental Schools for evolving that capacity into capability. All institutions have this developmental social responsibility, but especially business which are, in theory, value-adding processes. That is because they are structured to work from Wholes serving Greater Systems beneficiaries. Value-adding processes are necessary to development humans, where they have to overcome the self-centeredness and passive approach to life. Institutions such as organized communities, education in a Place, or an industry, who take on the yoke of being a developmental center.
That is a different cosmology than humans are intended to recuse natural system that they, and other humans, have damaged. Humans as they exist now, do not have a world view or capability that knows what the right ‘doing’ in the universe. But we ignore and set ill-advised, incompletely understood missions and purposes. Humans cannot manage themselves, much less know how the universe works well enough to course correct. Without development inside of Developmental organizations who are dedicated to this work.
To become a Developmental Organization , the lived experience in each institution, is one of becoming and valuing an intention of development, in every act, each decision, and a pervasive effect of working and engaging with nuture humans growing into their work. It takes a radical different way of designing work. The high priority is bringing development to the foreground trusting that increasingly capable and conscious people, embraced with a compelling corporate direction, is The Way to have a business get results.
Goal: Designing for Innovative Contribution
It is stressful to be a manager since the results of the business ride on your shoulders and you achieve it by remote actions that are expected to spread into people to achieve someone else’s bidding. Neither the manager or the workers have created the direction, although in the best of organizations they participate to some degree depending on their place in the rating and ranking. It is achieved mostly through delegation and behavioral manipulation.
In a Development Organization, you have 100% of the brain, heart and hand contribution of every person is unlimited due to title, performance reviews, or training. A person’s motives lie in the desire to make a difference for particular stakeholders. It is based on Personal Agency by living in a Will culture. All work is guided by initiative of each individual toward a shared organizing concept. Not a mission for doing good, but one direction for the whole that specifies what the business is creating in the world by its products and service offerings; for stakeholders who count on them, such as consumers for living extraordinary lives; as distributors to give people significant access where they meet them; as suppliers who understand how their essence is serving the purchasing organization. E.g. Seventh Generation organized around the concept of offering ‘the authentic voice and example of sustainability for efficacious household and personal care living.” They promised they could be counted on to educate and transparently display designing, manufacturing, and offering clarity, trust, and wisdom in living a life that ‘rang true’ in every action by all who were in their communities. And they in theirs. These were not marketing words but a guide to those who delivered on it. And everyone who got a paycheck was expected to generate new endeavors for specific outcomes that they promise to deliver on.
To shift the culture, there is an elegant straightforward parallel infrastructure, with no human-hierarchies of some humans tell others their work. But there is ubiquitous development of all persons embedded into work, which of course is needed to deliver on this infrastructure. No generic training. The culture in Seventh Generation, and other Developmental Org, with myself as a resource as co-developed them, was built on the development of human capability as the foundation and foreground of daily work.
The most often made comments about this work design is “there is no limit of number of people achieving the top rank. It is restrained only by you making a big contribution to specific stakeholders that is conceived within the corporate direction, the master organizing concept!” “Oh!, and developing yourself to do it beyond where you started.” “It is practically impossible to discriminate against others, because everyone’s eye is on the global effects, not the gaming.” And “it is extraordinary to be invited into that level of making a difference, over and over.” “The matrix is neutral in evaluation. No one is judging you but the stakeholders.”
The financial return as one measure, in Developing Organization with such a work design, is an average of 35% revenue growth for the next 5 years. Seventh Gen’s ROS in the five years prior to being purchased by Unilever was 46%, per annum. And their Co-Founding and CEO, Jeffrey Hollender, said it changed his life, as well as the business. Significantly, the value and opportunity of working in that ecosystem was unanimous.
Direction: If we want people to individually initiate big ideas for evolutionary regenerative growth, guided by a compelling organizing Business concept, (again, not a mission for doing good, that is the How) they need to think, evaluate, and deliver from a powerful being AND doing to pull off such a work design. They need to think for themselves, in the context of a community of such people. The authority comes from internal wisdom tied to great wholes the organization is serving. External authority gives way to internal assessment. Bringing the innate drive to serve inline with the living systems system thinking capability. Learning to use development processes and frameworks is a culture change from outside experts and certified deciders. Again, a new nature of soft infrastructure is provided with personal capability to use.
Finally, the frameworks offered bring a new nature of science used in indigenous communities and wisdom traditions. Also found in major stream of quantum sciences. The focus starts with Wholes, not fragments, and looks at the working of Systems, not parts labels and studied when static. Place is an organizing concept of whole systems, and essence of singular process is how you understand dynamics. It is a very different way of thinking that takes several years for those not raised in such a culture or upbringing. But it leaves us with no externalities and their attendant side effects and trade-offs. Where it is used, education is within a value-adding process of contribution to a greater system. Organizations has less bias every year and have infrastructure that does NOT invite exercising it. The reflection rituals built into the culture make is development to see and evolve self. Development replaces the need for advocacy, advocacy positioning, racial bullying that is condoned, limited opportunities and benefits. There is no scarcity because the outcomes exceed the demands for all human parties and beings.
And families, democracies, and living ecosystems become healthier as well.
Join us for The Regenerative Human Potential Summit : Reimaging Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, to learn more about this , now six decades old, way of designing work and management processes. A Half-day introduction and experience of the Culture.
Investment: $648 for 3 team members. $216 for add’l attendees. No discounts or solo tickets. Organization Consultants, trainers, coached invited to CAD, Change Agent Development, not the Summit.
March 26, 2023 9 am – 1pm pacific time.
Question: carol@carolsanford.com
Website: CarolSanfordInstitute, The Regenerative Business Institute
Bias is not something we are taught to observe and manage and therefore we become conditioned to depend on external authority messaging. Carol Sanford
1. [1] The five premises of behavioral psychology.
First, human introspection is not possible and therefore people cannot accurately observe or describe what is going on inside of them.
Second, consciousness and the ability to self-manage does not exist and this means that human agency, which depends on having a conscious purpose or aim, is an illusion.
Third, all human behavior is the result of intentional or unintentional conditioning, and a functioning society needs to bring this conditioning under its orderly and scientific control.
Fourth, psychologists with the appropriate training and expertise should be responsible for managing conditioning processes across society.
Fifth, empirical assessment requires specialized instruments (e.g., testing) that can accurately measure and quantify human behavior and are designed and utilized by experts who can deploy them in correct and unbiased ways.
[2] Cited from Indirect Work: A Regenerative Theory of Change, by Carol Sanford, p.
[3] The word "competition" originates from the Latin word "competere," which means "to strive together." However, over time, the meaning of the word has evolved away from shared endeavors taken on in parallel or supportively, and most of us today think of competition as a situation in which individuals or groups compete against each other to achieve success or gain an advantageover others. We could attempt to return to the original meaning of compete, to work alongside one another in contributing something distinctive to a greater whole’s work by being together in an agreed-on and engaged strategy. Or we can design work structures that accomplish this by how they work.
It's curious to me that a culture that so elevates science, especially the flawed current economic logic as a "science", simultaneously ignores the findings of scientists engage in climate research and tracking-- and even the increasing realities! It makes me think- it's not "I wouldn't have believed it had I not seen it myself", but the deeper truth is perhaps "I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it myself." My apologies if this is only tangently related to your topic at hand. Your writings always make me think deeply. And it's all connected. I appreciate you and your work.