2040's Ideas and Innovations Newsletter, Issue 57: The Fault in Ourselves Revisited
The Fault in Ourselves … Revisited
Issue 57, May 26, 2022
When we originally published this newsletter, Ukraine was not making headlines; there was no fifth wave of Covid; state primaries hadn’t happened; Disney was running theme parks in Florida without taking a public political position; the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard spectacle fighting out their own interpretations of the truth; and Elon Musk was not making news acquiring/not acquiring Twitter. Leading an organization has become a landmine with the public weighing in on everything from social and climate justice to personal opinions about the organization’s local and national politics. As Maureen Dowd recently wrote in The New York Times, “Everywhere we look, we are deluged with deception and Big Lies. Across the world, customized facts are the rage. Truth has left the building.”
You may think this has nothing to do with running an organization. But it does when public trust is eroded in political systems, institutions, and business leaders. And we believe this review of The Fault in Ourselves reveals how personal bias and groupthink can derail any organization as it has our now polarized public forums supporting the freedom of choice and civil dissent. We are sharing this newsletter with you again as a reminder of how critical it is to be fair, self-aware, open to differing viewpoints, and setting intentions to elicit a collaborative workplace culture. The command-and-control horse is out of the barn, as is the antiquated silo organizational structure. We are all held accountable to our stakeholders and the public at large. Identifying the fault in ourselves will accelerate our journey to organizational success and workforce high performance.