Raids on the Unspeakable

In the fall of 1965, the scribe monk Thomas Merton published a collection of prose writings he titled Raids on the Unspeakable. These pieces were a departure from the usual religious themes he covered in his prolific body of work. Raids was written as a candid commentary on the turbulent Sixties. This was a troubling time in the deeply divided United States as an unpopular war polarized a nation for the remainder of the decade. Those of us who lived through the Sixties remember the violent riots, burning cities, and civil unrest. Few of us would want to relive the decade, and until recently, most of us were convinced the worst period in our lifetime was behind us.

Merton’s prose was an attempt at the time to help readers makes sense of a confusing world by crafting original myths, reflecting on the writings of contemporary novelists, contemplating painful lessons learned from the then recent dark vestiges of Nazism, and encouraging an appreciation for art and freedom. The latter, in particular, was most important because it is art and freedom that are often the conduits for clarity when the world is most confusing.

Art and freedom provide us with the tools to ask questions and challenge the actions of those who seem to sow confusion, or worse yet, chaos. Without the ability to question freely, sensemaking often becomes an impossible task. When art and freedom are stifled and those who ask questions are penalized, a growing space of what’s unspeakable prevails. And when the unspeakable becomes sacred, the great danger is that ignorance rather than intelligence shapes the contours of the world around us.

A few years before Merton was advising us on how to raid the unspeakable, a young engineer in Delaware was contemplating how to build a business organization where a raid would not be necessary because nothing would be unspeakable. After a seventeen-year stint at the DuPont Company, Bill Gore decided to start a new business with a very clear picture of how his new venture would be radically different from his old employer. He wanted his new company to resemble a carpool. That’s because, during his time at DuPont, he noticed the most productive conversations happened in the drives to and from work when people were free from the conversational constraints of traditional command-and-control management. Gore noticed that when those in charge are able to censor different ways of thinking and determine what’s unspeakable, these bosses limit—sometimes severely—the intelligence of the organization. Because nothing was unspeakable in the carpool, the free wielding conversations among Gore and his colleagues were often catalysts for creatively intelligent ideas.

Gore realized designing his company as a carpool required a core organizing principle: No single individual could have the authority to kill a good idea or keep a bad idea alive. In other words, there would be no bosses in his new company. No one, including himself, would have the authority to censor another person or designate any topic as unspeakable. Accordingly, instead of a top-down hierarchy, Gore built a peer-to-peer network where teams of peers self-managed their work. Throughout the Sixties, while a nation wrestled with the hazards of living in a world where much was unspeakable, the makers of Gore-Tex quickly became one of the best places to work because everyone’s voice mattered and no one was censored.

As things turned out, we survived the Sixties, the war ended in the early Seventies, and the void that Merton called the Unspeakable faded as deep divisions subsided over the next few decades. In the meantime, W. L. Gore and Associates’ novel organizational model was wildly successful as the start-up grew into a very profitable enterprise that today employs over 12,000 people. Despite its longstanding success, few  companies have followed Gore’s lead, even though, in recent years, the pace of change is rapidly shrinking the lifespan of Fortune 500 enterprises. Ten years from now, it’s highly likely that Gore will still be serving its customers, while 50 precent of the companies on the current list of the Fortune 500 are expected to vanish from the list. Perhaps this is the price of the unspeakables that plague command-and-control enterprises.

As the readers of this column and my books know well, for the past two decades, I have been writing about the need for business organizations to adopt the peer-to-peer network organizational model, not just because it’s a far more effective way to lead an organization, but more importantly, because it may be the only way that companies can survive when the pace of change keeps accelerating. The problem with top-down hierarchies is they have a bias for the status quo and don’t respond well to change. That’s because hierarchical leaders are often preoccupied—some might say obsessed—with expanding control. They manipulate information and steer conversations both within and outside their organizations in the pursuit of maximum control over workers, customers, and markets.

However, in a rapidly changing world, the organizational challenge is not about expanding control, it’s about expanding consciousness. It’s about becoming more intelligent by creating organizations that can learn and adapt as fast as the world around them. Peer-to-peer networks are better suited for this challenge because, when no one can control what is speakable or unspeakable, unconscious biases are uncovered and open discussion often leads to new insights for developing the business. Open conversations and innovative processes that rapidly aggregate collective intelligence are the network leaders’ tools for expanding the consciousness of an entire organization poised to succeed in changing markets.

While I remain convinced that the transformation of business management is essential for business longevity, I have come to realize the longevity of a far more important organizational entity is suddenly in peril. And if this entity were to collapse, it could be the end of the  most successful government in the history of human civilization.

The popular philosopher Yogi Berra once mused “It’s déjà vu all over again.” And so it seems, as the Twenties of the 21^stCentury eerily resemble the Sixties of the 20^th Century. Once again, we are a deeply polarized society marred by unpopular wars, violent riots, burning cities, and civil unrest, only this time the seeds of discontent have been spread across Europe as well as North America. Once again, the scourge of the Unspeakable has descended upon us in the form of an extensive public-private censorship alliance. Raiding this incarnation of the Unspeakable will be far more difficult because of the extensive toolkit of digital applications that make it easier for the citadels of censorship to control populations. It is this toolkit that presents the danger because advances in artificial intelligence and the expansion of the Internet of Things provide unprecedented opportunities for population control, as previewed by China’s development of social credit scores that determine the extent of a citizen’s social rights and privileges. These tools in the hands of bureaucratic leaders atop centralized top-down hierarchical governments provide the wherewithal for tyrants to create outlandish totalitarian structures. Unfortunately, this campaign is gaining steam as the leaders of historically democratic governments silence dissenting voices and increasingly criminalize free speech. The Unspeakable has returned with a vengeance.

However, we are not powerless—at least not yet. But time may be short. To turn the tide, we must entrust these new tools to leaders who will build decentralized peer-to-peer networks rather than centralized top-down hierarchies. For example, if AI and IoT applications are developed on blockchain platforms—where no single person or single viewpoint can coerce or censor another person—we have the opportunity to create a human-machine symbiosis that promotes and cultivates higher forms of enlightened and practical  democracies while, at the same time, depriving would-be tyrants from amassing coercive power. In the hands of truly democratic leaders, advances in digital technology could help us explore what Abraham Maslow called the farther reaches of human nature.

Those of us who have had the good fortune of building and leading decentralized peer-to-peer networks have experienced a preview of these farther reaches. We have learned that the  collective intelligence aggregated from the full diversity of opinions is the highest form of human intelligence. We have benefitted from a radically different paradigm of power—synergistic power—which is the expansion of power with rather than power over. We have come to understand that synergistic power is the elixir that makes peer-to-peer networks more human, more successful, and most importantly, more sustainable than top-down hierarchies.

At this time, I am announcing a shift in the focus of this column. While the transformation of business organizations continues to be important for the health and sustainability of large and small enterprises, it is mission critical for the future of democratic republics. Whether we construct digital platforms as centralized top-down hierarchies or decentralized peer-to-peer networks is likely to determine the future course of human civilization. If the proponents of hierarchies prevail, we will likely find ourselves in a world of digital tyranny shaped by the firm grip of totalitarian leaders who hold unprecedented control over all activities of our lives. On the other hand, if the champions of networks triumph, we are likely to evolve human civilization by expanding our intelligence to create new forms of democracies and peer-to-peer economies that advance the lives of all citizens. 

Going forward, this column will be a candid discussion on our turbulent times. As a consequence, you may find future articles may be more controversial. If intelligence is to prevail over ignorance, we must, like Merton, raid on the Unspeakable. And following the example of Gore, we need to create and cultivate peer-to-peer networks where everyone’s voice matters, no one is censored, and people are free to think differently.

To learn more about the incredible power of peer-to-peer networks, see my new book Nobody Is Smarter Than Everybody: Why Self-Managed Teams Make Better Decisions and Deliver Extraordinary Results.