The Age Of Unreason Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  By the same author

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Preface to the second edition

  Part One: Changing

  Chapter 1 The Argument

  Chapter 2 The Numbers

  Chapter 3 The Theory

  Part Two: Working

  Introduction

  Chapter 4 The Shamrock Organization

  Chapter 5 The Federal Organization

  Chapter 6 The Triple I Organization

  Part Three: Living

  Introduction

  Chapter 7 Portfolios

  Chapter 8 Re-inventing Education

  Chapter 9 An Upside-Down Society

  Epilogue

  For Reading and Reference

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Charles Handy is an independent writer, broadcaster and teacher. He has been an oil executive, an economist, a professor at the London Business School, the Warden of St George’s House in Windsor Castle and the Chairman of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce.

  He was born in Kildare in Ireland, the son of an Archdeacon, and educated in Ireland, England (Oxford University) and the USA (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

  His many books include The Empty Raincoat, Understanding Organizations, Gods of Management, The Future of Work and Waiting for the Mountain to Move.

  He and his wife Elizabeth live in London and Norfolk.

  Also by Charles Handy

  Understanding Organizations

  Understanding Schools as Organizations

  Understanding Voluntary Organizations

  Inside Organizations

  Gods of Management

  Waiting for the Mountain to Move

  The Empty Raincoat

  Beyond Certainty

  Hungry Spirit

  Thoughts for the Day

  The Age of Unreason

  Charles Handy

  Acknowledgements

  The future is not inevitable. We can influence it, if we know what we want it to be. That conviction is the reason for this book. We can and should be in charge of our own destinies in a time of change.

  The book, in part, builds on my previous writings: on organizations, on the future of work, on schools and voluntary organizations, on middle-age and on religion. They all, I now realize, hang together as different parts and parcels of life. To separate them out was to collude with the besetting sin of modern life, reductionism, reducing things to their component parts and thereby too often, missing the meaning and message of the wood in a minute examination of its trees.

  The book is addressed primarily to those who work in and who manage organizations or some part of them, because it is their hands that rest on the levers of change, although they may not always realize it. The changes which we are already seeing in our lives, and which we will see more of, have their origins in the changes in our workplaces. Work has always been the major influence on the way we live. It still is, but often in unexpected ways.

  The ideas in the book come from many sources, only some of which I have been able to acknowledge specifically in the text. The managers, and others whom I meet in seminars, courses and conferences around the world have contributed many of them, and a group of young executives drawn together by Hay Management Consultants in 1988 to look at the world ahead of them was particularly stimulating. Peter Drucker’s thoughts on the Age of Discontinuity and Tom Peters’ on A World Turned Upside-Down anticipated two of the major themes of the book. They were talking about organizations. I think it goes much farther than that.

  Without the encouragement, and the deadlines, of my publishers, Gail Rebuck and Lucy Shankleman, this book would not have happened. I am very grateful to them for their perceptive comments and their belief in the book. Elizabeth, my wife and partner, has lived with every line of this book, on the page and in our life together. I applaud the generosity with which she has tolerated this writing through living and all the help she has given me. Writing the book was my way of beginning to take charge of my destiny: I hope that reading it will help others to do the same.

  Charles Handy,

  Diss, Norfolk,

  England.

  Preface to the second edition

  I was in Dresden not so long ago, in what we must now call Eastern Germany. Herr Motte is the man responsible for returning to private ownership the 700 or so business corporations that were, until 1991, owned and controlled by the state in that area. He had a staff of 32 and needed to sell one or two corporations every day to meet his target, with many of them literally unsaleable. It is a formidable task and I asked him where he looked for guidance. ‘In reshaping the business sector of Eastern Germany,’ he said ‘there are no models. We have to re-shape the future.’

  When this book was first published that wall which divided East from West was a permanent obstacle to peace. Within six months it was gone; a dramatic example of the discontinuous change which was the excuse for the book. Herr Motte’s answer to me was also the perfect summary of how we must respond, not by looking to the past but by creating something new, different and hopefully better, by being ‘unreasonable’ in the sense in which George Bernard Shaw meant the word, by thinking unconventionally, even upside-down.

  The book is about work and about individual lives, not about politics and wars and countries, but the messages are the same and the changes just as dramatic. As this edition goes to press there are fears of widespread recession. Part of that recession will be because our organizations have become too expensive, too complicated and cumbersome. Like the centrally planned economies of the old communist world these centrally planned organizations are also discovering, rather late in the day, that the old ways which worked quite well in the past are no longer cost-effective. They will have to re-shape their futures and re-think the way they get work done if they are going to survive in an age when technology makes almost anything possible.

  The answers will affect us all. All over America, on a recent trip, I saw splendid new office towers in the downtown city areas. No lights shone there, however, because no-one was in them. Recession? Or a big re-think about the need for expensive offices in the new organizations? We shall have to wait and see.

  I have not changed my views since the first edition came out, about the way the world of work is heading and the ways we need to respond, although I have updated some of the numbers and the examples. Nor do many people seem to disagree, in broad principle, with these views although they may argue about the detail and the timing. For most, however, it is a depressing prospect, one of a tide of history going out carrying with it a lot of dead fish, driftwood and garbage. For me, it is a tide coming in, full of opportunities for new launches and some re-floatings. Incoming tides can also, of course, swamp the unsuspecting and the unready and I still worry about the hordes I see pouring off the commuter trains every morning who seem to think, or hope, that they live by a tideless and unchanging sea.

  They don’t. Nor do these tides keep to neat tables. They come in surges. It is truly an age of uncertainty and of unreason. Like it or not we shall have to live in it, and most of us, for much of our now longer lives, will live in it outside those comfortable prisons which we called organizations and which provided the structure for our days and years.

  That new freedom is the most significant bit of discontinuous change for most of us. But as the new democracies of Eastern Europe are finding, freedom can be very uncomfortable. I believe that there is no choice. The old ways of work are gone; we have to re-shape our futures. A lot hinges on those who will lead and design the new organizations. They, not our politic
ians, are the makers of our destinies and it is to them that this book is mainly directed in the hope that they may have the vision and the courage to be sensibly unreasonable.

  Charles Handy,

  Diss, Norfolk,

  England,

  1991.

  Part One: Changing

  1 The Argument

  THE SCENE WAS the General Synod of the Church of England in the 1980s. The topic being debated was the controversial proposition that women be admitted to the priesthood. A speaker from the floor of the Chamber spoke with passion, ‘In this matter,’ he cried, ‘as in so much else in our great country, why cannot the status quo be the way forward?’

  It was the heartfelt plea not only of the traditionalists in that Church but of those in power, anywhere, throughout the ages. If change there has to be let it be more of the same, continuous change. That way, the cynic might observe, nothing changes very much.

  Continuous change is comfortable change. The past is then the guide to the future. An American friend, visiting Britain and Europe for the first time wondered, ‘Why is it that over here whenever I ask the reason for anything, any institution or ceremony or set of rules, they always give me an historical answer – because . . ., whereas in my country we always want a functional answer – in order to . . .’ Europeans, I suggested, look backwards to the best of their history and change as little as they can; Americans look forward and want to change as much as they may.

  Circumstances do, however, combine occasionally to discomfort the advocates of the status quo. Wars, of course, are the great discomforters, but so is technology, when it takes one of its leaps forward as it did in the Industrial Revolution, so is demography, when it throws up baby booms or busts, so is a changing set of values, like that which occurred during the student unrest of 1968, and so are economics.

  Circumstances are now once again, I believe, combining in curious ways. Change is not what it used to be. The status quo will no longer be the best way forward. That way will be less comfortable and less easy but, no doubt, more interesting – a word we often use to signal an uncertain mix of danger and opportunity. If we wish to enjoy more of the opportunity and less of the risk we need to understand the changes better. Those who know why changes come waste less effort in protecting themselves or in fighting the inevitable. Those who realize where changes are heading are better able to use those changes to their own advantage. The society which welcomes change can use that change instead of just reacting to it.

  George Bernard Shaw once observed that all progress depends on the unreasonable man. His argument was that the reasonable man adapts himself to the world while the unreasonable persists in trying to adapt the world to himself, therefore for any change of consequence we must look to the unreasonable man, or, I must add, to the unreasonable woman.

  In that sense we are entering an Age of Unreason, when the future, in so many areas, is there to be shaped, by us and for us; a time when the only prediction that will hold true is that no predictions will hold true; a time, therefore, for bold imaginings in private life as well as public, for thinking the unlikely and doing the unreasonable.

  That, then, is the purpose of this book – to understand better the changes which are already about us in order that we may, as individuals and as a society, suffer less and profit more. Change, after all, is only another word for growth, another synonym for learning. We can all do it, and enjoy it, if we want to.

  The story or argument of this book rests on three assumptions:

  — that the changes are different this time: they are discontinuous and not part of a pattern; that such discontinuity happens from time to time in history, although it is confusing and disturbing, particularly to those in power;

  — that it is the little changes which can in fact make the biggest differences to our lives, even if these go unnoticed at the time, and that it is the changes in the way our work is organized which will make the biggest differences to the way we all will live.

  — that discontinuous change requires discontinuous upside-down thinking to deal with it, even if both thinkers and thoughts appear absurd at first sight.

  Change Is Not What It Used To Be

  Thirty years ago I started work in a world-famous multinational company. By way of encouragement they produced an outline of my future career – ‘This will be your life,’ they said, ‘with titles of likely jobs.’ The line ended, I remember, with myself as chief executive of a particular company in a particular far-off country. I was, at the time, suitably flattered. I left them long before I reached the heights they planned for me, but already I knew that not only did the job they had picked out no longer exist, neither did the company I would have directed nor even the country in which I was to have operated.

  Thirty years ago I thought that life would be one long continuous line, sloping upwards with luck. Today I know better. Thirty years ago that company saw the future as largely predictable, to be planned for and managed. Today they are less certain. Thirty years ago most people thought that change would mean more of the same, only better. That was incremental change and to be welcomed. Today we know that in many areas of life we cannot guarantee more of the same, be it work or money, peace or freedom, health or happiness, and cannot even predict with confidence what will be happening in our own lives. Change is now more chancy, but also more exciting if we want to see it that way.

  Change has, of course, always been what we choose to make it, good or bad, trivial or crucial. Take, for instance, the one word ‘change’ and consider how we use it. Can any other word be asked to do so many things?

  ‘Change is part of life’ (a noun universal)

  ‘There is a change in the arrangements’ (a noun particular)

  ‘Please count your change’ (a noun metaphorical)

  ‘Please change this wheel’ (a verb transitive)

  ‘I will not change’ (a verb intransitive)

  ‘Where do I change trains?’ (a verb metaphorical)

  ‘She is a clever change agent’ (an adjective)

  Where the same word is used to describe the trivial (a change of clothes) and the profound (‘a change of life’), how can we easily distinguish whether it is heralding something important or not? When the same word can mean ‘progress’ and ‘inconsistency’, how should we know which is which? We might well ask whether the English language was devised to confuse the foreigner, or ourselves?

  More of the same only better, and, if possible, for more people. It was a comfortable view of change, one which, in the growth-heady days of the sixties and seventies allowed so many to marry idealism to their personal prosperity. It allowed the big to grow bigger, the powerful to look forward to more power, and even the dispossessed to hope for some share of the action one day. It was a view of change which upset no one. The only trouble was that it did not work, it never has worked anywhere for very long, and even those societies in which it has seemed to be working, Japan, Germany and, perhaps, the USA are about to see that it does not work for ever. In each of those societies it is now increasingly relevant to ask ‘what is the next trick?’ because the current one shows every sign of ending.

  It is not just because the pace of change has speeded up, which it has done, of course. We must all, sometime, have seen one of those graphs comparing, say, the speed of travel in 500 BC and every 100 years thereafter, with the line suddenly zooming upwards ever steeper in the last inch or two of the chart as we approached modern times, when horses are superceded by cars, then by planes and then by rockets. Faster change on its own sits quite comfortably with the ‘more only better’ school. It is only when the graph goes off the chart that we need to start to worry, because then things get less predictable and less manageable. Incremental change suddenly becomes discontinuous change. Catastrophe theory, they call it in mathematics, interestingly and symbolically, the study of discontinuous curves in observed phenomena, graphs that loop back on themselves or go into precipitous falls or unsuspected plateaux. Trends, af
ter all, cannot accelerate forever on a graph paper without looping the loop.

  I believe that discontinuity is not catastrophe, and that it certainly need not be catastrophe. Indeed, I will argue that discontinuous change is the only way forward for a tramlined society, one that has got used to its ruts and its blinkers and prefers its own ways, however dreary, to untrodden paths and new ways of looking at things. I like the story of the Peruvian Indians who, seeing the sails of their Spanish invaders on the horizon put it down to a freak of the weather and went on about their business, having no concept of sailing ships in their limited experience. Assuming continuity, they screened out what did not fit and let disaster in. I like less the story that a frog if put in cold water will not bestir itself if that water is heated up slowly and gradually and will in the end let itself be boiled alive, too comfortable with continuity to realize that continuous change at some point becomes discontinous and demands a change in behaviour. If we want to avoid the fate of the Peruvian Indians or the boiling frog we must learn to look for and embrace discontinuous change.

  That is more revolutionary than it sounds. Discontinous, after all, is hardly a word to stir the multitudes; yet to embrace discontinous change means, for instance, completely re-thinking the way in which we learn things. In a world of incremental change it is sensible to ape your elders in order to take over where they leave off, in both knowledge and responsibility. But under conditions of discontinuity it is no longer obvious that their ways should continue to be your ways; we may all need new rules for new ball games and will have to discover them for ourselves. Learning then becomes the voyage of exploration, of questing and experimenting, that scientists and tiny children know it to be but which we are soon reminded, by parents, teachers and supervisors, can be time-wasting when others already know what we need to learn. It is a way of learning which can even be seen as disrespectful if not downright rebellious. Assume discontinuity in our affairs, in other words, and you threaten the authority of the holders of knowledge, of those in charge or those in power.