to explain where i have arrived in my understanding of power and love and social change, i have to explain how i started.
i grew up in montreal and studied physics at mcgill university. in the summer of 1981, as i was finishing my undergraduate degree, i attended a meeting of the pugwash conference on science and world affairs in banff, alberta, where i heard a speech about the crucial energy and environmental challenges arising out of the increasing complexity and fullness-of people and ideas and things-of the world. i decided to shift my studies from physical to social sciences, and i went on to do a graduate degree in economics and public policy at the university of california at berkeley. after graduation, i worked at a variety of research institutions in north america, europe, and asia, and then in the corporate planning department of pacific gas and electric company in san francisco.
my father had taught me the value of industriousness-of doing my job well, whatever that job was-and of self-determination and self-improvement. his favorite story was of henry david thoreau, who had lived in the woods at walden pond and after two years had come out with his axe sharper than when he had gone in.
i was young and ambitious and keen to make my mark on the world.
generative power
in 1988, when i was twenty-seven years old, i moved from san francisco to london to take a job in the global strategy department of the energy company royal dutch shell. what i loved most about working for shell was the power. i enjoyed getting the diplomatic memos: "the government of c?te d'ivoire has reiterated their request that we desist from referring to them as the ivory coast." i once got a mistaken phone call asking me where a $300 million payment for a fuel oil delivery should be deposited. i liked shell's practical role in providing the world with energy: the company invested hundreds of millions of dollars a year in research and development, drilled for oil thousands of feet underwater, and produced fuels by heating oil sands and cooling natural gas. i reveled in being a small cog in this big and important machine.
i was at shell at the height of capitalist confidence. the berlin wall had just fallen, the internet boom was starting, francis fukuyama had published "the end of history," tom wolfe was writing about manhattan financiers as "masters of the universe," and margaret thatcher was pronouncing that "there is no alternative" to the anglo-american free enterprise model. the dominant cultural meme was that in all spheres-economic, political, social, legal, international, intellectual-a contest among competing powers produced the best outcome.[11] from my office in a london skyscraper, it seemed to me that if everybody just did their job and pushed forward their part-engaged in civilized, manly jostling-the whole would grow and prosper.
my experience at shell, and elsewhere in the world of business, was of an almost single-minded emphasis on the pragmatic use of power-the kind of power that a former physics student could recognize. it seemed to me that businesspeople understood power the same way martin luther king jr. did: "power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose."[12] their actions seemed to accord with paul tillich's explanation of power's generative root: "the drive of everything living to realize itself, with increasing intensity and extensity." this drive can be seen in the force of a growing seed: the force that "guerrilla gardeners" employ to turn vacant urban lots into parks, when they surreptitiously plant seeds that break through the concrete.
at shell i could see how my own drive for self-realization, along with that of my colleagues, produced furiously competitive intellectual creativity and growth. the head of our department, arie de geus, wrote a book called the living company. this helped me also see how the company's living drive for self-realization, along with that of other companies, produced furiously competitive commercial creativity and growth.[13]
in all of this i saw the generative aspect of power: the universal drive to "get one's job done." power expresses our purposefulness, wholeness, and agency. although power is the drive to realize one's self, the effect of power goes beyond one's self. power is how we make a difference in the world; it is the means by which new social realities are created. without power, nothing new grows.
at shell i was head of the strategy group that constructed scenarios-plausible alternative stories-of social-political-environmental contexts in which the company might find itself. in 1991, pieter le roux, a professor at the left-wing university of the western cape in south africa, contacted me because he wanted to use the shell methodology to help a group of south african opposition leaders develop a strategy for effecting the transition away from apartheid. nelson mandela had just been released from twenty-seven years in prison, and the negotiations between the opposition and the white minority government had started in earnest. le roux's project sounded interesting and worthwhile to me, and my shell bosses were happy, after years of being vilified for not having divested from south africa, for the opportunity to rebuild the company's relationships with the opposition. so in september 1991, i traveled to cape town to facilitate the first workshop of what became known as the mont fleur scenario exercise.[14]
what i found exhilarating in meeting these leaders-from political parties, trade unions, community organizations, universities, and companies-was their powerful purposefulness. every one of them was committed to addressing, from their particular idological and institutional base, south africa's tough challenges, and they had already realized that they could be successful only if they worked together. white businessman johann liebenberg later remembered, with surprise and pleasure, his conversations with the black leaders who had hitherto been his adversaries: "this was new to me, especially how open-minded they were. these were not people who simply said: 'look, this is how it is going to be when we take over one day.' they were prepared to say: 'hey, how would it be? let's discuss it.'"[15] i felt excited to play a part in this important social change process.
what i saw in these workshops, and through the window they provided me onto the dynamics of south africa's extraordinary transition, changed my understanding of what was possible in the world. i saw that a team of leaders from across a social system could, even in the most complex, conflictual, and challenging of contexts, exercise their power collectively to change that system for the better. i was inspired by what i was learning about this generative power.
what i saw also changed my understanding of what was possible for me. i saw that i had a job to do-a way of making a difference in the world-in supporting such teams. in 1993, i resigned from shell and moved to south africa. since then i have been doing this kind of work there and elsewhere.
degenerative power
how do we come to notice something that we are not noticing? i was once working in my office, and my sunglasses were in my shirt pocket. i went into a dark closet and leaned over to pick up some supplies near the floor, when i heard a sound that i couldn't place. as i went out, i unconsciously filed away that anomalous event-the unexplained sound-and went back to what i was doing. later i saw that i had misplaced my sunglasses and began looking all around for them. then i remembered the unexplained sound and realized it had been the sound of my sunglasses falling out of my pocket onto the closet floor.
during the first years after i left shell and started working as a facilitator of social change teams, i kept hearing sounds of a second kind of power that i didn't know how to interpret. my first interpretation of what had happened at mont fleur-the interpretation that i was working from-was that the team had decided that their power, their drive to realize themselves as individuals and as a nation, could more effectively be exercised working with rather than against one another. they had used four bird images to summarize their shared understanding of the different ways the future of the nation might unfold: an "ostrich" scenario of white denial, a "lame duck" scenario of an overconstrained new black government, an "icarus" scenario of the new government flying too high too fast, and a "flamingos" scenario of rising slowly together. but when pallo jordan, one of the intellectual leaders of the african national congress, heard these scenarios presented at a party meeting, he thought they were ridiculously na?ve about the essentially violent dynamics of power in the south african context. "what is all this about ducks and flamingos?" he asked incredulously. "the only birds that matter here are hawks and sparrows!"
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